Peoples, Cultures and Nations in Political Philosophy

PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY PAUL GILBERT Edinburgh University Press PEOPLES, CULTURES AND ...

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PEOPLES, CULTURES AND NATIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

PAUL GILBERT

Edinburgh University Press


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qw PAUL GILBERT

EDINBURGH University Press

© Paul Gilbert, 2000 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Bembo by Pioneer Associates Ltd, Perthshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by The University Press, Cambridge A CIP Record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 1091 X (paperback) The right of Paul Gilbert to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

CONTENTS

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Preface

vii

Introduction

1 7

Part I

Concepts

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3

Race and Ethnicity Cultural Identity Nationality

9 32 57

Part II

Theories

77

Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6

Cosmopolitanism, Conservatism and Liberalism Communitarianism Marxism and Postmodernism

79 101 123

Part III

Issues

145

Chapter 7

Citizenship, Immigration and Indigenous Peoples Multiculturalism Self-determination and Secession

147 167 189

Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Conclusion

210

Index

216


PREFACE

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This book is intended as an introduction to a topic that has, in recent years, come to the forefront of political philosophy: how can ethnic, cultural and national groupings be accommodated into the political arrangements of states? The book reflects my own attempts to clear the ground for thinking about these highly charged problems in a cool and orderly way. Perhaps inevitably, given the times in which we live, it has turned out more polemical and impatient than I anticipated; though this will, I hope, provoke readers as much as it may exasperate them. As always I am indebted to innumerable friends and colleagues at Hull and elsewhere who have stimulated or disciplined my own reflections. I am especially grateful, however, to Matthew Festenstein and Kathleen Lennon for their valuable comments on the book in draft. My thanks, too, to my editors, Jane Feore and Nicola Carr, my copy editor Anna Claybourne, and to Chris Coulson for preparing the manuscript for publication. Unless the context indicates otherwise, ‘he’ and ‘she’ are used throughout this book without any specific implications as to gender.

vii


INTRODUCTION

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Political philosophy reflects its own times. Since the Second World War these have, until recently, been dominated by a Cold War which had two effects on the philosophical agenda. The first was to focus attention on what constitutes a just social order; is it one modelled on socialist principles or one that embodies some version of liberal democracy? In answering this question the individual is usually unproblematically conceived of as simply an undifferentiated member of the social order, albeit one occupying different possible social positions within it. Political arrangements are to be judged on whether or not the way they serve the interests of individuals so conceived secures justice.The second and indirect effect of the Cold War was, in large measure, to occlude questions about the legitimacy of states, for the practical effect of raising the question of whether existing states corresponded appropriately to the peoples within them was to threaten the fragile balance of power which prevented the Cold War from erupting into potentially catastrophic hostilities. The societies the justice of whose arrangements was debated were, then, for the most part simply assumed to be societies corresponding to established states. All this has changed with the end of the Cold War. First, the collapse of socialist states leaves liberal democracies challenged, not from within their own cultural traditions, as Marxism challenged them, but from without, by radically different social formations such as Islamic communities or aboriginal groups. Political arrangements are then judged by whether they adequately recognise and support these 1


alternative social formations, which may have their own standards of justice. What arrangements can deal satisfactorily with such differences? The second change is that the destabilisation of international power relations allows the legitimacy of state boundaries to be called into question and nationalist movements to flourish. What social groupings do have a good claim to their own states? These questions are among the principal concerns of contemporary political philosophy.1 They reflect, in different ways, the issue of how certain sorts of social identity are relevant to politics. They are not questions that can be straightforwardly dealt with in terms of the interests of the undifferentiated individuals of earlier political theory, for they deal precisely with the politically relevant ways in which citizens or potential citizens are differentiated one from another.They deal with what has come to be known as ‘the politics of difference’.2 What sorts of social identity are relevant here? The politics of difference has been taken to comprise the politics consequent upon claims arising from a whole variety of differences – of gender, sexuality or physical capacity as well as of race, ethnicity, culture or nationality. Here we shall be concerned only with identities of the latter sorts.We can characterise these as identities relevant to classifying their bearers as peoples.The former sorts of identity do not so characterise them; for a people constitutes or might constitute a complete, continuing society with its own internal differences of gender and so forth. Many kinds of political question arise concerning how different peoples, however conceived, are to be treated.These include important questions about the distribution of resources and, in particular, about what measures can adequately prevent discrimination which results in unfair distributions. They include, too, questions about how the public culture of a state, notably its education system, can accommodate differences between the peoples who may comprise its citizens. Both types of question raise philosophical issues, but they are not what we are primarily concerned with here. Rather we shall look at some issues arising from a third range of questions, which concern what political arrangements are appropriate in the light of the fact that individuals can be conceived of, and can conceive of themselves, as constituting various distinct peoples. Such questions concern, on the one hand, clearly constitutional matters such as where the boundaries of states should be drawn in terms of their populations. On the other, they concern matters less explicitly constitutional but nonetheless affecting the very general political character of a state, such as whether and, if so, in what ways the state recognises various constituent peoples, 2

INTRODUCTION

either as forming political groups or as contributing differentially to the identities of citizens as subjects of the law: does it, for example, recognise certain specific languages – and if so, how? – or does it merely permit certain individual rights in relation to unspecified languages? Both of these groups of matters raise fundamental philosophical questions.The first raises, in particular, the question of the legitimacy of a state to constitute the political organisation of the people or peoples within its boundaries, and a corollary question, the right of peoples to set up their own separate state. These questions are evidently also questions about what forms of government are just and what sorts of freedom people can reasonably enjoy – and issues regarding such freedoms arise even when the legitimacy of a state, in a strictly constitutional sense, is not under challenge, as in the second sort of political matter sketched above. It is whether people are being treated justly in the political arrangements that are made for them, and whether they can enjoy from such arrangements the freedom to which they are entitled, that concerns us when we ask how their different collective identities should be reflected in the way they are treated as members of a state. Does its legal system, for example, treat cultural minorities fairly and allow them the freedoms that members of the dominant culture have? Questions of legitimacy, justice and freedom are, of course, the staples of political philosophy: legitimacy because it is necessary if citizens are to acknowledge political obligations to the state rather than simply be coerced; justice because it is what citizens look to the state to provide, rather than order based purely on repression; and freedom because what makes one a citizen of a state, rather than a slave, is that one enjoys a full measure of freedom from the dictates of others. There are, that is to say, constitutive links between citizenship of a state and the legitimacy, justice and freedom at which the state should aim. All this is so whatever culturally specific conceptions of legitimacy, justice and freedom particular groups of people may entertain, assuming that they look to a modern state for their governance. The assumption that they do so is, however, for the most part justified by the facts; so we are not already starting off on the wrong foot in treating questions of legitimacy, justice and freedom as fundamental to our discussion of the political arrangements appropriate to different peoples. Nor does our employment of these notions need to demand more than the barest understanding of what they amount to. Any richer conception will need to be defended to those to whom arrangements embodying it are to be applied. 3


This last point illustrates a more general one. We need to be concerned not only with what may seem to be appropriate political arrangements to those in a position to control them, but also with the reception such arrangements will encounter from those to whom they are applied. For example, in assessing whether some set of political arrangements treats some cultural group fairly or is oppressive to them, we should aim to put ourselves into the shoes of the governed as well as into those of the governors, with whom political philosophers often too readily identify. This in itself will make us more sensitive to possible clashes between the cultural standpoints of each party. For, although we cannot avoid taking up some specific standpoint in determining, say, whether some political arrangements are just, to impose arrangements, however just they are themselves, may itself be, by anybody’s standards, unjust.This is in many cases a cause of resentment and a ground for political claims. It is important to bear in mind whether a given philosophical approach to collective identity can support a way of successfully negotiating this problem. There is a further corollary of this point concerning the viewpoint from which political arrangements should be assessed. It is that the notion of a shared identity which creates a people can itself be taken either as one imputed to them by others or as one which they claim for themselves. Evidently political arrangements based on an identity which people do not acknowledge may be the cause of grievance. Yet, equally, arrangements which reflected a quite misguided claim to shared identity would be open to criticism. In the first part of the book we shall look at a number of different kinds of collective identity; some, like race, are imputed; others, like ethnicity, involve self-identification; while yet others, such as cultural or national identity, may be treated in the one way or the other. Our aim in the first three chapters will be to clarify these conceptions of identity and indicate in very general terms how they might bear on political arrangements. The three chapters in the second part of the book investigate philosophical theories of political organisation and the role of the citizen. Most important among these for contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy are liberalism and communitarianism. There are different varieties of these, each with its distinctive account of how the collective identities deemed relevant can be accommodated into a suitable set of political arrangements. On the Continent, however, and where identity is studied within a framework of cultural studies rather than of philosophy more narrowly conceived, Marxist and postmodernist approaches have been influential. Why this should be and 4

INTRODUCTION

what they can offer by way of a critique of liberalism and communitarianism are explored in the final chapter of this part of the book. The third and final part aims to bring together some of the material in the other two in order to address three topics of current concern. The first is the question of who is entitled to citizenship of a state, and, in particular, what restrictions can fairly be imposed on immigration leading to citizenship.The second is how people of different cultures, whether indigenous or immigrant, can best live together within the same state: what political arrangements are conducive to this? The third concerns the point at which people who cannot or do not wish to live together are justified in seceding from the state and forming a separate one. No neat answers emerge from these discussions, and the book’s conclusion counsels against expecting them. Most of the theories brought to bear have been devised for social and political circumstances widely different from those of the present day, in particular ones in which people identified themselves and each other differently from the ways that now they do.Yet how people identify themselves is itself partly a product of philosophical theories. Political philosophy does not only reflect its own times – it changes them. NOTES 1. See for example W. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: OUP, 1995) and D. Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: OUP, 1995) – works which have set the agenda for much recent political theory. 2. See for example I. M.Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990).

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PART I

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1 RACE AND ETHNICITY

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RACIAL CATEGORIES

In Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad articulates, though not without authorial irony at the expense of his English narrator, Marlow, a certain stereotype of Africans: Suddenly, as we struggled round a bend there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy.1 The stereotype is a racial one in that Africans are categorised as racially distinct from Conrad’s European travellers in two intimately connected ways. They differ in appearance and in behaviour. The former comes into prominence because of the latter – ‘a whirl of black limbs’ – and the latter is perceived as different because ‘incomprehensible’: whether the Africans, as Marlow goes on to reflect, were ‘cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us – who could tell?’ It is an incomprehension which results from their being located – that is to say from the Europeans locating them – in a different social world.Yet, and this is crucial, they were not inhuman . . . They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was the thought of 9


their humanity – like yours – the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.2 Race as a category is a way of classifying human beings, and from this common humanity Marlow moves on to derive a subversive thought about their behaviour:‘a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you – you so remote from the night of the first ages – could comprehend’. It is a subversive thought because it suggests that there is, in fact, an option of participation in the African’s social world, an option which the Europeans have rejected quite deliberately.3 Race, then, is a way of classifying people in terms of similarities and differences indicated by appearance and revealed in behaviour which are deemed relevant to social relations with them, and, what is more, similarities and differences which are themselves conceived of as unchangeable and conferred by birth. Racial description is a form of social categorisation,4 that is to say, it embodies a mode of classification arrived at by classifiers acting as observers of those they classify and classifying them in terms independent of any that those classified might use to classify themselves. More particularly it classifies them as, in one important sense of the word, peoples, marked out and maintained as such by reproductively transmitted physical characteristics and their longstanding behavioural concomitants. It is as peoples thus distinguished that differentiated social relationships with them and political arrangements for them are deemed appropriate. Peoples, however they are classified, are bounded collections of folk, in the sense that no one can be a member of two distinct peoples within the same classificatory system. Thus no one is deemed both black and white, mixed race classifications requiring an augmentation of racial categories, rather than the acknowledgement of dual membership. Linguistic categories are not bounded in this sense, since people can speak more than one tongue, so that language speaking per se cannot mark out distinct peoples. Peoples are, furthermore, generally assumed to be systemically bounded, (though, as we shall see, it is not always clear what this assumption rests upon). That is to say, it is assumed everyone is a member of some people or other, so that this classification of them forms a comprehensive system. Racial classification is an obvious example. Geographical location, by contrast, does not always give rise to systemically bounded collections of people, since not everyone is located somewhere in a permanent way. Nomadic peoples, for example, may travel widely and other peoples may have migrated or dispersed. This is not to say, of course, that 10

RACE AND ETHNICITY

peoples thus picked out independently of their location are thereby being categorised racially. Racial categorisation is only one way of classifying peoples among others, each with its own system. Is there, though, any principled way of categorising people racially? One theory is that races are biological categories, analogous – or even equivalent – to biological species. The modern notion of race corresponds to the rise of scientific taxonomy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in that period a variety of theories of the biological nature of races were propounded.5 They include the conflicting views that races were actually separate species (polygenesis) or the same (monogenesis), this question turning in part upon the viability of inter-racial reproductive union.6 It is otiose to observe that, for obvious reasons, monogenesis prevailed, but this did not settle the question of whether there are significant biological differences between so-called races and biological similarities within them. But only if there are would there be any strong reason to suppose that the superficial features of appearance or behaviour on the basis of which races are identified are non-contingently linked to differences of capacity or disposition. Only if there are differences in capacity or disposition, however, would there be a prima facie case for taking features of appearance or behaviour as relevant to the social relations between races. The short answer is that there are no significant biological differences. Of course, skin colour, to take an obvious example of a feature used to discriminate races, depends on underlying genetic factors. But there is no good evidence that the mechanisms responsible for skin colour have any effect on, say, intellectual capacity or emotional tendencies. Skin colour indicates no significant underlying characteristics at all, and this is borne out by the fact that ‘black’ people, commonly thought of as constituting a single race, display enormous genetic variety, indicating the lack of any unifying factor of which their colour is somehow indicative. Genetic differences between members of the same racial category can be greater than the average difference between members of different races.7 Clearly there are populations which diverge from each other genetically as a result of a variety of factors – mutation, geographic isolation and so forth. No doubt these populations can often be discriminated on the basis of appearance. But there seems to be no principled way of classifying them into races, and no ground for thinking that such classifications reveal significant biological differences. This is not the place to pursue a discussion of biological categories. 11


The point is that while races have evidently been thought to be biological categories the beliefs involved here are largely false. Can we simply conclude that there are no races, put the belief in them down to bad science, and leave the matter at that? THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF RACE

Unfortunately we cannot just jettison race. It is understandable that ‘there is,’ as Sarup reports,‘loud laughter whenever I tell black audiences that race does not exist.’8 The reason for this is that social categorisation in racial terms continues to go on despite the fact that the science at one time used to justify it has been discredited. Race exists as an entrenched category of social differentiation which anyone is able to apply. But should they? Might it not be argued that in view of its dependence on a discredited science, racial categorisation should be abandoned and its use abjured in social description and political theorising? This is in many ways an attractive position. Robert Miles has advocated it, arguing that racial categorisation involves an ideology of racism,9 where an ideology is taken to be a set of beliefs which provides an inaccurate representation of the world.What is needed, he argues, is, on the one hand, an explanation of how this ideology comes to be generated and reproduced, and, on the other, an accurate picture of the world to which it is applied. This will involve modes of classification other than those of race. There are, however, a number of problems with this approach. First, it is far from clear that those who deploy racial categorisations necessarily need to possess the false biological beliefs briefly exposed above. All that they need do is apply the concept of ‘black’ or whatever in the usual way. What may make their thinking racist is not that there are no natural kinds picked out by such concepts, but rather that they apply the concepts in a way which involves the different social treatment of those categorised as racially distinct. Such differential treatment and hence the categorisations which support it can persist after a particular set of beliefs, for example scientific ones, has been abandoned.Arguably this is already happening in the case of race, with the biological underpinnings of the category giving way to supposedly more respectable cultural ones,10 yet without marked changes in the way the category is applied or in the social differentiation arising from it. Second, it is an illusion to suppose that we can describe the workings of society without employing the concepts that social actors 12

RACE AND ETHNICITY

themselves use, flawed as these may be. Indeed the suggestion that we should dispense with racial categories in order to counter racially based social differentiation is self-defeating. For we must use racial categories in order to describe the social differentiation they involve. There is no reason to think that we can capture the categories whose members are treated differentially in any other terms.The assumption that Miles makes is that the only concepts that are properly employable are those which pick out kinds of thing in a way independent of the concerns of the social actors who deploy them: they pick kinds out in terms of their essences. Perhaps some concepts, especially those of science, are like this. But there is no reason to think that the sorts of concept characteristically employed in social description are of this sort. There is no reason, that is to say, for us to be essentialists about such concepts, and thus about racial categories. These categories are not discovered; they are drawn for particular social purposes.And if we dissociate ourselves from racist purposes, as Miles rightly urges us to do, the new categories we may deploy are not to be thought of as necessarily different in kind from those he wishes us to abandon.They too are, we may say, socially constructed. The notion that race, like many other categories of social description, is socially constructed is now widely accepted. It is important, however, to be clear exactly what is involved in this claim.The difficulty is that different theorists use the notion differently, so that an element of stipulation is unavoidable. Social construction, as I use the term here, occurs when an item is identified through a socially motivated practice of classification, which there would be no reason to so identify had such a practice not been adopted. It is easy to see that to regard the item in question as thus socially constructed is to abjure an essentialist view of it, for it is precisely to deny that there is a reason for identifying it in terms of the disclosure of its essence. Now, given that racial categories do not disclose essences, it is plausible to suppose that race is socially constructed, since this supposition allows us to connect the features by which races are picked out with the practices of social differentiation that depend upon their identification. But, whereas under essentialism these practices are explained in terms of beliefs, true or false, about races, under social constructionism the fact that beliefs about races are available at all is to be explained in terms of the motives for engaging in these practices. There are two points it is necessary to note about the claim that race is a social construction as so understood. The first is that it does not imply the proposition touched on above that race does not exist. 13


Although some social constructionists have wanted to treat all socially constructed items the way we treat, say, witches, and consign them to the realm of fictions, the mere fact of construction does not have this consequence.11 Witches do not exist because, to put it crudely, the concept of a witch is that of one with magical powers, and no space exists in the causal realm for the operation of such powers.There are no similar tight linkages between the concept of race and our ontological beliefs. There may be a point to asserting that race does not exist, either, as we have seen, to challenge a biological view of it or to deny its ethical relevance to social treatment, but there is also a danger: namely that of overlooking the role race – and not some surrogate for it – plays in social relations. And in that case we neglect the nature of and reasons for the social construction of race.12 The second point to note is that, on the understanding of social constructionism here presented, it does not follow that race is only as old as is its social construction. If, as we shall see, its construction is a relatively recent phenomenon it does not follow that race itself is. Whether it is will be a quite separate question depending upon the way race is constructed; and in fact it is so constructed that we want to be able to talk about the existence of races in the past, even if their existence went unrecognised and did not provide a basis for the same sorts of social differentiation as it does in modern times. Another way of putting this point is to say that certain social categories, like race, can be socially constructed without the facts about them being social facts – that is to say, facts that exist only within the context of certain social practices.13 Facts about race are not social facts, because race is a form of social categorisation that picks people out not in terms of their place within social relations but in terms of properties independent of, though supposedly relevant to, such relations, for example putatively biological ones.What, we need to ask, is the nature of racial categorisation and how does it come about? RACISM

Needless to say there are a variety of different answers to these questions, partly as a result of differences in what racism is taken to involve. For it is racism – the treatment of people differently on account of their race – which constitutes the social practice underlying the social construction of race.What is required for racism on this understanding? Was Conrad himself for example, as the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe describes him, a ‘bloody racist’?14 For arguably the Africans in 14

RACE AND ETHNICITY

Heart of Darkness are presented as different in a way that would make it simply not possible to treat them as Europeans treat each other.We must remember, of course, that they are presented through the eyes of Conrad’s narrator Marlow, but even through his eyes it is doubtful that they are presented as different because of their race. Cultural difference in the tribes along the Congo is certainly signalled, but when individual Africans are met with they are clearly shown as the brutalised victims of colonisation, in a way that calls to mind the words of Dr Livingstone: In reference to the status of the Africans among the nations of the earth, we have seen nothing to justify the notion that they are of a different ‘breed’ or ‘species’ from the most civilised. The African is a man with every attribute of human kind. Centuries of barbarism have had the same deteriorating effects on Africans, as Pritchard describes them to have had on certain of the Irish who were driven some generations back, to the hills in Ulster and Connaught.15 Indeed, it is against the differential treatment of Africans on racial grounds that Conrad’s book was written, following his own journey up the Congo into the colony run for the personal benefit of King Leopold II of Belgium.The horrific cruelties practised in this colony were justified on the grounds of the supposed racial difference of black Africans by, ironically, Livingstone’s rescuer, H. M. Stanley. They were being exposed at the time of publication of Heart of Darkness, and Conrad’s message is of a piece with this exposure. It is, in Terry Eagleton’s words, that ‘Western civilisation is at base as barbarous as African society’.16 This is not a message that supports a charge of racism, however pessimistically unfitted to oppose colonialism it may be and however questionable its representations of Africans are.What sort of treatment, then, does constitute racism? The answer which immediately comes to mind is that racists make people of another race the object of aversion and even hatred. Such feelings of ‘aversive racism’17 are held to explain the differential treatment of members of other races which manifests itself in social separation. But this, though undoubtedly a form of racism, is not the only form, since it underestimates the extent of racism even in sophisticated liberal societies where such feelings are disavowed.18 Aversive racism may be distinguished from ‘dominative racism’ which manifests itself, instead, in practices like systematic exploitation and even slavery. But this again may seem too narrow to cover all cases, pervasive as it 15


is, for it fails to cover racism towards an economically or socially superior group. It has been suggested instead that what is common to all racism is exclusion,19 whether from the social life of others, as in apartheid, or from their positions of economic or social advantage, as in racial exploitation. The difficulties with this account, however, are firstly that it seems too wide, and, secondly that it seems to add little to the fact of social differentiation, the racist nature of which is being scrutinised, except perhaps that the differentiation in question is unfavourable to those deemed racially different. Maybe there is little else to add, and race is a category which supposedly licences an indeterminate variety of unfavourable treatments, and can be called into play to justify an indefinite range of social exclusions. If this is so then it is unlikely that any single explanation of racism will be forthcoming. Yet it is worth glancing at some explanatory theories, since they at least bring out what diverse sorts of factor might be involved in the construction of race, and thus how a single category can serve a variety of social purposes. One class of theories stresses the economic benefits to particular groups of a system of racial categorisation which enables them to dominate or exploit others in their own interest. Theories of this sort may take an explicitly Marxist view of race as an instrument for capitalist exploitation.20 Support for such views is drawn from the fact that working-class people have often been conceptualised as racially different from their social superiors, as in Victorian Britain.21 Other views may fasten more specifically upon Western imperialism as responsible for racial categorisation. Charles Mills, for example, argues that the category of non-white racial type was constructed at the beginning of the colonial period to legitimise the treatment of colonised subjects as morally and politically inferior sub-persons.They are conceived of as in, or close to, a state of nature but, unlike whites, as constitutionally incapable of fully leaving it to enter political society through a social contract.Thus they are excluded from full participation in a politics founded upon a ‘racial contract’ made between whites and are placed under white hegemony, in, for example, the colonial regimes about which Conrad wrote. This hegemony continues today, after its founding principles and colonial manifestations have been formally disavowed.22 In a related view Kenan Malik argues that racial categorisation arises as a way of rationalising the persistence of social inequalities – as exemplified in slavery and colonial rule – against the paradoxical background of an Enlightenment belief in universal human equality.23 Clearly such inequalities are to the continuing advantage of Europeans and particularly European 16

RACE AND ETHNICITY

elites, and this explains the persistence, through conceptual reshaping, of racial categories. Theories like these see domination as the principal purpose of racial categorisation and seek to locate specific beneficiaries as responsible for it. A contrasting type of theory draws on the work of Michel Foucault 24 to view race as one category among many others whereby people are subjected to a disciplinary regime in which the power to control them stems, not mainly from coercion, but from the deployment of a discourse which rationalises systematic techniques for such control. According to this type of view, the taxonomies of the Enlightenment, like that of race, are themselves instruments of disciplinary power, the order that results from their application being its manifestation. David Goldberg takes the Enlightenment project itself, then, to explain the construction of race.25 Although there are beneficiaries there is no general answer to the question of how they benefit and no possibility of seeing racial categorisation as merely an instrument fashioned for their advantage. In this vein, however, the role of the state may be emphasised as institutionalising racial categories to achieve stability and increase state power.Yet what racial categories are institutionalised is fluid and contingent upon circumstances. For example, as a result of complex socio-political causes the category of Mulatto officially disappeared in the USA in the early twentieth century.26 A new category of Hispanic has recently arisen to undermine the resulting bipartite black/white classificatory system. Such facts point to the dependence of such systems, for all their epistemological pretensions, upon the changing requirements for the maintenance of power. There is, as I suggested earlier, no reason to assume that the power employed in the construction of race should take one single form, or that the processes involved should be uniform: perhaps a Marxist explanation may sometimes be appropriate, sometimes a Foucauldian one, and sometimes neither.27 GROUP IDENTITIES

We have deferred till now an objection to the employment of racial categories which will have suggested itself to many readers. It is that racial categorisation is wrong because it is applied to people independently of the way that they think about themselves. Conrad’s Marlow, for instance, obliterates the different tribal identities of the Africans he observes in categorising them all as ‘black’.The category of ‘Hispanics’ in the USA, to take a contemporary example, comprises people from 17


Mexico, Puerto Rico and Cuba who may think of themselves in terms of these diverse origins, not as sharing any common racial character, especially since the inhabitants of these countries are themselves racially categorisable as Amerindian, Mulatto and so forth. Racial categories are constructed by groups sufficiently powerful, with respect to the intellectual and institutional control of such categorisations, to determine to what categories others are assigned in ways that have radical effects upon their lives and over which they have no control. That, it is objected, is the principal and original infringement of freedom involved in racial categorisation. This objection enables us to draw a vital distinction between social categorisation, as involved in the concept of race, and group identification.28 The latter consists in people classifying themselves as belonging together in virtue of their shared characteristics so that they may be said to constitute a social group.Thus a social group, properly speaking, is individuated in terms of its members’ way of classifying themselves, while a category is individuated in terms of a classification employed by others. A social group is, then, in a certain sense self-conscious: it is a collection of people acknowledging their common membership, able to recognise other members and to mark them off from nonmembers. Nothing stronger than this is necessarily intended: nothing, for example, by way of internal cohesion or structure. Nonetheless, a group is more than merely a collection of people able to apply another’s categorisation of them to themselves.Their acknowledgement of common membership comes to more than this, though exactly how is a subtle question.What we can say is that even if the classification involved is borrowed from others it must be made the group’s own, in the sense that it functions just as if the group had devised its own classification. To put this differently: if we assume that groups, like social categories, are socially constructed (which, as we shall see, is highly plausible), the members of a group must perceive themselves to be involved in its construction. For the fact that they play a part in determining how a classification is to be applied differentiates a social group from the simple case of social categorisation, where they do not. It will now be evident that though we have treated race as simply a social category its status can, in some circumstances, be ambiguous. People who are categorised as ‘black’ by others may identify themselves as ‘black’ and thereby form a social group. The processes of group identification consequent upon such racial categorisation are instructive. Those categorised together will be treated similarly and the recognition of this can lead to an acknowledgement of something in common 18

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by way of shared experience, interests and so forth. If, as is likely, the experience is of oppression in some form and the interest is in removing it, then the basis on which the group members are oppressed – namely race – will be that which they see as collecting them together into a group.29 Consciousness of this kind – ‘black consciousness’, for example – may be a necessary condition for effective collective action against oppression. This provides a further objection to the denial of the existence of race discussed earlier: for such a denial may also obstruct the very group formation that is necessary to combat the injustices consequent upon racial categorisation. How, though, can a category like ‘blackness’, which is used to relegate its members to an inferior position, be used by them as an acceptable criterion of group identification? Clearly a rejection of the assumptions used to justify their relegation is required, and different forms of ‘black consciousness’, for example, can in different circumstances proceed to build group identification by appeal to different features of ‘black’ experience. Négritude was a cultural movement initiated with this intention in the 1930s by the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire.30 Its aim was to oppose the European picture of black people as uncivilised and to recover for them an African culture, which, the movement’s proponents believed, would reveal an essential Africanness in which black people could unite with pride.This model of ‘black consciousness’, which manifested itself politically in Pan-Africanism, has been opposed recently by, for example, Kwame Anthony Appiah, on account of its essentialism, which led to a fancifully homogenised presentation of African culture. Appiah holds that: the very invention of Africa (as something more than a geographical entity) must be understood, ultimately, as an outgrowth of European racialism; the notion of Pan-Africanism was founded on the notion of the African, which in turn was founded not on any genuine cultural commonality, but on the very European concept of the Negro . . . Simply put, the overdetermined course of cultural nationalism in Africa has been to make real the imaginary identities to which Europe has subjected us.31 Paul Gilroy, who concurs in these criticisms, has offered an alternative picture, which aims, for political reasons, to preserve ‘black consciousness’ but to ground group identification in ‘black’ people’s common cultural response to the experience of slavery, a response that is open to development in the light of their continuing oppression.32 Sophisticated as Gilroy’s account is, however, arguably it is to be preferred to 19


Césaire’s only because it is itself a response to quite different historical circumstances from the colonial ones that Césaire faced, so that the essentialist categories of colonialism are no longer relevant to shaping black consciousness. If this is so it illustrates how a variety of supposedly shared characteristics can contribute to identification with a similarly grounded group.What is required is that these characteristics be ones valued by the group, even if the features which bind the group, such as racial ones, are not. Not all social categorisation leads to group identification because it may not lead to similarities of experience within categorial boundaries.The elaborate systems of racial categorisation in Brazil and other parts of South America, which reflect the variable mix of people of Amerindian, European and African origins do not, by and large, give rise to self-conscious racially distinct groups since, although racially distinguished individuals are treated differently, there are wide variations of social experience within racial categories and little segregation. Where group identification can and does, by contrast, run along racial lines, members of one’s own group are not seen as the members of another are.Their appearance and behaviour are not attended to, even if they are the basis for group identification, for their appearance and behaviour are seen as similar and familiar. The reactions of fellow members to oneself reciprocate these attitudes, so that one is, so to speak, drawn into the group, not excluded from it, and along with this goes the making of assumptions about shared experience, interests and so forth which give rise to group identification. It should not be thought however that the fact that a group is constituted by its members’ self-identifications implies that membership of the group is optional. If people’s freedom is infringed by a failure to acknowledge their own group identifications, then this is not because these identifications necessarily reflect the way in which they choose as individuals to group themselves. Some groups may have this optional character, but others will be constructed, just as social categories are, in a way that leaves no choice as to membership: if I have the qualifying characteristics then I shall be deemed a member willy-nilly. That this can happen depends, of course, upon the power of the group as a whole. Sufficient disinclination on the part of individuals to bear its name may undermine that power and change the character of the group or destroy it utterly. But this fact does nothing to show that membership is optional all along. It raises the question, in consequence, of what sort of freedom is infringed by social categorisation if apparently similar processes of classification of some individuals 20

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by others can be involved in group identification.The answer must lie in the claims of people collectively to determine the way they classify themselves. The question of what sorts of groups can mount such claims and what their political ramifications are will preoccupy us in the next two and a half chapters. ETHNICITY

We are now in a position to introduce a notion of central importance to the subject matter of this book – ethnicity. It is a notion, we should notice, of which different accounts have been given. Some older theorists33 distinguish ethnicity from race simply on the grounds that ethnicity involves cultural rather than physical differentiation. In neither case is group identification held to be required, so that so-called ‘ethnic groups’ are not necessarily groups, as we have been understanding the term, rather than categories. Most recent theorists, however, following Max Weber,34 take ethnic groups to require group identification. Many do not, however, take them to be groups where there needs be actual common kinship between the members, again following Weber in holding that only a belief in common descent is necessary.This seems in danger of confusing two conditions: the first, which is surely necessary for ethnicity as ordinarily understood, is that membership of an ethnic group is transmitted by birth; the second, which is not, is that members should share some common biological origin. Recent theorists also tend to agree with older ones in making culture an individuating feature.This, as we shall see, is potentially misleading.We can perhaps agree that ethnic identification is focused upon a presumed common culture. That is what we saw in the cases of ‘black consciousness’ discussed in the preceding section. But in these cases it is race, not culture, that actually individuates the social groups so formed. It would be unduly restrictive to rule out such groups as these from the class of ethnic groups. Indeed it seems that because ethnicity, unlike race, requires group identification it is preferable to call them ethnic rather than racial groups. Ethnicity, understood as membership of a suitably sized social group transmitted by birth, provides a quite different criterion for the existence of a people from race, since an ethnic group, unlike a racial category, has to be a people in the eyes of its own members, not just in the eyes of others. This creates some doubt as to whether we are justified in supposing that ethnic groups are systemically bounded, as peoples are generally assumed to be. For there seems as yet no reason to suppose 21


that everyone should identify themselves as members of ethnic groups, not just because some individuals are ignorant of their membership, but because not all societies may provide for group identification along ethnic lines. In some, people might identify themselves quite differently, so that ethnic groups do not form a comprehensive system. There can be no doubting the fact, however, that a great many people do identify themselves as members of ethnic groups, and the question arises as to what is involved in this. An ethnic group has a name for itself – indeed this is often viewed as a necessary condition of its existence35 – and this fact provides strong evidence that ethnic groups are socially constructed and, furthermore, socially constructed by their members. It would be implausible to suppose that people simply notice some feature that they shared, a common culture say, and on that basis applied a name to themselves quite independently of it forming part of some socially motivated practice of classification. Many ways of drawing ethnic boundaries will be possible given the sorts of similarity neighbouring peoples will share and the differences that will exist within any people.Which ones are selected to delimit the ethnic group is socially motivated, in the sense that it depends upon the preferences of its members about with whom they should think of themselves as sharing group membership and the common name that goes with it.Whether Hispanics, to take an example mentioned earlier, are to think of themselves as constituting a single ethnic group depends upon whether their common language is taken as a bond which outweighs differences of culture and experience. A particularly influential social constructionist account of ethnicity has been that of the anthropologist Fredrik Barth.36 Barth wishes to emphasise the point that what is constructed in the formation or maintenance of an ethnic group is a boundary between members of the group and others. The requirement that membership be recognisable as such implies that non-members should also be recognisable as such. One mechanism involved here is the social categorisation of others outside the group, although, since the formation of one group is not commonly a process carried on in isolation from that of others, the determination of boundaries between groups will usually be a matter transacted between them.37 Some groups will be in more powerful positions to control the process than others. A ‘black’ ethnicity, for example, would have been inconceivable without the racial categorisation that excluded ‘black’ people from European ethnic groups. What Barth wishes to stress, however, is that it is the boundaries so determined which are crucial to the identity of the ethnic group 22

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rather than the common characteristics – the ‘cultural stuff ’ as he calls it – which group identification focuses on.These cultural characteristics can change over time, as in the developing conceptions of black culture underpinning a continuing black ethnicity which we discussed earlier; or they can vary, as the conceptions held by different members of the group may vary.38 It is this last point concerning the mutability and variability of an ethnic group’s ‘cultural stuff ’ that demonstrates why it is misleading to view ethnic groups as individuated by their cultures.We need to look instead at the scope of the group, which may in reality be determined by other factors, so that a common culture serves as a focus for group identification rather than being what generates the boundaries of the group. In some cases these may be fixed as the extent of certain social relationships, though it is important not to inflate what people with a common ethnicity have in common. A group is not necessarily a community in any of the many senses of this term, and an ethnic group need not involve any privileged social relationships. It may, for instance, exist as a group even when its members are widely dispersed among other groups so that such relationships are impossible even though group identification persists and the group is reproduced, perhaps exogamously. It is, furthermore, important to notice that ethnic distinctions may exist within communities: communities, at least in the weak sense of collections of people marked off by social relationships within them that do not extend beyond, obviously need not coincide with ethnic groups, and, as we shall see, communities in the stronger sense of people possessing a common purpose and mutual concern need not either.The kinds of argument there may be for recognising ethnic groups in political arrangements are, therefore, different from those for recognising communities. PRIMORDIALISM AND INSTRUMENTALISM

To assert that ethnic groups are social constructions, maintained by their members’ acts of group identification, does not settle a dispute which has agitated theorists for several decades, namely that between so-called primordialists and those variously referred to as modernists, situationalists, or instrumentalists. The plethora of terms for those on one side of the debate suggests, as we shall shortly verify, considerable ambiguity as to what is at issue between the parties. But we can take, for now, Jenkins’s definition of a primordialist as one who believes that ethnicity is ‘a fundamental, primordial aspect of human existence and 23


self-consciousness, essentially unchanging and unchangeable’.39 If primordialism is true then it follows immediately that ethnic groups do form a comprehensive system. For then people everywhere and always will identify themselves ethnically, whether this is the result of some socio-biological imperative40 or, in Geertz’s words, of ‘the “givens” . . . of social existence’,41 such as loyalty to kin.Without primordialism in one of its forms there is, as indicated earlier, no obvious reason to suppose that ethnic groups do form a system of peoples. It should be evident that it is wrong to suppose, however, as many theorists do,42 that primordialism contrasts with social constructionism. If an ethnic group is identified only through a socially motivated practice of classification then this is quite compatible with that kind of practice itself being an unchanging feature of human life, motivated by some fundamental human drives for group identification of the appropriate kind. What may have suggested otherwise is that while race can pre-exist its construction as a category, ethnic groups cannot, since the processes of self-identification which construct them are also those which bring them into existence as social entities. But primordialists need only deny the modernity of this type of identification, while insisting on its necessity for individuating peoples as ethnic groups, to rebut the charge of essentialism. However, it is necessary to unpack the various contrasts that can be drawn between primordialism and its opponents. We have just noticed one – the contrast with modernism, which is the view that certain sorts of people, and here ethnic groups, are a specifically modern phenomenon: ‘a new word’ – ethnicity – ‘reflects a new reality.’43 According to this view it is an illusion to suppose that the same social forms are timeless, as Conrad’s Marlow for example does, as he tells his travelogue by the Thames and reflects, ‘darkness was here yesterday’44 – likening the inhabitants of pre-Roman times to those of the Congo nearly two millennia later. One modernist argument is, instead, that ethnicity is generated by a modern form of identification that results either from the breakdown of traditional hierarchies that conferred identities on people45 or from ‘the difficult problems that arise from having to live with difference’46 – a situation produced by modern population movements. The processes involved in ethnic group identification seem, however, to require no modern rootlessness or dislocation to be intelligible. A distinct kind of modernist argument holds that it is only in the modern period that ethnic groups with hereditary membership appear, as for example the ‘tribes’ recognised and partly created by colonialists with racial assumptions about human 24

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groupings.47 Prior to this, analogous social groups permitted more fluid membership with possibilities for voluntary reclassification. This is a more plausible story. We do not need to accept its details to recognise the need to look at the specific situation in which each ethnic group is constructed rather than to assume a blanket story like primordialism. Situationalism, so-called, may be thought of as a more general theory than modernism, holding only that ethnicity is not a constant aspect of social life but a feature that it presents in some situations and not others. Situationalism is often equated with instrumentalism,48 that is to say with the view that ethnic groups are formed and maintained to serve particular social ends, principally economic and political ones, so that unless people are in a situation in which ethnicity will serve such ends it will not be appealed to in group formation; other kinds of social groupings, self-conscious classes say, may be created instead. But what exactly does instrumentalism contrast with when it is opposed to primordialism? One suggestion is that ‘the primordialist view of the ethnie [that is, the ethnic group] would be that it exists largely for its own sake’,49 rather than for some further ends. Presumably this means that group members identify themselves as such because they find the existence of group membership valuable in itself, and not just for some additional benefits which it brings them.Yet it is hard to see why this distinction between different sorts of social motivation for ethnic identification should go along with the distinction between an unchanging feature of life and an historically contextualised one. A possible reason draws on the suggestion that instrumentalists neglect the ‘overpowering emotional and non-rational quality’ of ethnic bonds, which are ‘recurrent and largely inexplicable’.50 But not only has Jenkins rightly pointed out that ‘there is no necessary contradiction between instrumental manipulation, and sentiment’,51 it also seems that emotions may explain individual attachment to the group while the ends it serves make plain the group’s character and boundaries. Primordialists and instrumentalists here appear to pass each other by in actually explaining different phenomena. A similar situation concerns the claim that primordial attachments are given, not adopted for tactical reasons. Arguably this simply spells out the nature of ethnic membership which, as we have seen, is given rather than chosen. It need contradict no instrumentalist explanation of the shape of the ethnic groups commanding such attachments.Again, the givenness of ethnic membership, which concerns the limitations on individual choice in the formation 25


of social identity, needs distinguishing from the claim that what ethnic groups there are must be treated as given, as somehow inexplicable. It is only the latter that instrumentalists need to deny. What I suggest, then, is that primordialism is best understood as holding both that ethnicity is a recurrent feature of human social organisation independent of the particular circumstances people are in, and that it draws on deep-seated human attachments. Situationalists – including modernists – deny the first, holding that ethnicity is invoked only in certain situations. But they do not need to deny the second. Instrumentalists need deny neither, holding only that which ethnicity is invoked is to be explained in terms of the ends its invocation serves. On this understanding the primordialist/instrumentalist contrast posits a false dichotomy, though it is worth noting that if primordialism is rejected then a resort to instrumentalism is attractive, for the phenomenon of ethnicity can then be explained on a case-bycase basis. Conversely, if it can be so explained, then the generalities of primordialism are likely to seem otiose. The debate is indeed an intellectual mire, with the disputants often at cross-purposes and invariably oversimplifying the variety of possible positions on both sides. Before we leave, however, we should note one last pair of distinctions whose importance will emerge only later. Instrumentalists are often accused of having an over-rationalistic, means/ends view of the construction of ethnicity.52 Yet, it may be claimed, people do not consciously shape their ethnic groups. Rather they unconsciously do so through identifying with others who share their experience of life. An instrumentalist can accept the importance of unconscious processes and still go on to ask what purposes are served by such identifications.The conscious/unconscious distinction is related to another, between individually and collectively controlled constructions. Instrumentalists need not think of an ethnic group as created by a number of individuals with common interests who choose to pursue them through the formation or maintenance of such a group. Instrumentalists can, instead, take the purposes served by the construction of the group to be those of the group as a whole (or at least of some dominant part of it) so that there is no reason to think that individual members could formulate and pursue them. And, furthermore, the purposes they do avow may be self-deceptive. The exploitative ends of a group – of Conrad’s white colonists, say – are not redeemed by avowals of higher purposes.

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POLITICAL RECOGNITION OF ETHNIC GROUPS

The debate over primordialism and instrumentalism is relevant to the question of whether ethnic groups as such have a claim to some sort of political recognition – an issue to which, in different forms and applications, we shall be returning throughout this book. We can see now, however, that primordialism creates a presumption in favour of recognition which instrumentalism does not. For if ethnic groups really are basic units of social organisation and the objects of deep attachments which ensure their continuity, then political arrangements which ignore them are likely to prove ineffectual. There seems no reason to think that this form of social organisation has stronger political claims than any other without the primordialist assumptions, which, it must be noted, do not confer superior value on such a form, merely superior viability. If the factual basis of primordialism is disputed, then the ethical standing of ethnicity as a principle of political organisation may be called into question. Since this principle is likely to involve the social categorisation and exclusion of others, it may be thought that its dangers are at least as prominent as its advantages in providing a nexus for social attachment. For without the assumptions of primordialism we can always ask why such attachments, valuable as they may be, should be directed upon ethnic groups rather than upon some other sort. An instrumentalist account of ethnic groups, which, I have suggested, is highly plausible in explaining their specific forms and development, focuses attention upon the particular purposes served by them. In that case we shall assess the claims of individual ethnic groups in the light of their ethical character as revealed by these purposes. How, though, are we to classify such purposes in order to arrive at an ethical assessment of the groups which have them? Although no doubt in almost all cases the identifications which form one group and those which form another will have a mutual impact, we can usefully oversimplify matters by distinguishing ethnic groups which largely exist independently of the social categorisations that others make of them, and those which exist largely by virtue of such categorisations – by virtue, we may say, of the group’s reaction to them. Let us start, then, by considering categorisation-independent or, as I shall call them, nonreactive groups. Non-reactive ethnic groups may exist for a wide variety of reasons, not all of which are of any ethical relevance.We can very roughly distinguish two kinds of case: groups constituted by a 27


common interest, fairly narrowly conceived, and groups constituted by a common culture.The latter, to be investigated more fully in the next chapter, involve ethnic group identification for reasons of common language, customs and so on, which will no doubt show up more sharply by contrast with the different languages and customs of others. The reasons for group formation in these circumstances must, however, involve more than mere boundary marking: for example, the desire for richer social relationships with co-culturalists – the desire, to use the notion to be developed later, to form not only a group but a community. Yet while the relationships entered into of trust, reciprocity and so forth, may have an ethically favourable character, other people will, of necessity, be excluded from them. And this may or may not be ethically justifiable. The case for political recognition may turn on whether it is. This can be seen more clearly by looking at ethnic groups constituted by common interests. Here we can distinguish between interests members share by virtue of the environment they and only they find themselves in, and the interests they share in contrast with the interests of others in the same environment. In the former case, others in the environment are not excluded and this ethically favourable aspect of the community the group may form counts in favour of group recognition. In the latter case, there are some common interests whose pursuit clearly militates against recognition. An ethnic group formed, for example, to dominate others, as in colonial contexts, scarcely has a good claim, however admirable its internal relationships.The whites of the American southern states formed, perhaps, in this position, as Allen has argued,53 a ‘white race’ (in our terms a white ethnic group), bringing together the otherwise conflicting interests of various white people in order to sustain the institution of black slavery. Other shared interests which exclude others may not have such a morally repugnant character, but they should still be viewed with scepticism as grounding a claim for ethnic group recognition. If we look by contrast at reactive ethnic groups we can view their formation in many cases as attempts to right the wrongs by, for example, dominative groups; and thus we can view them as having a good claim to recognition, which furthers their chance of success.This, however, it may be objected, is an undesirably ad hoc response. It addresses itself to the question of what rights should be accorded to groups given the circumstances they find themselves in, not to the question of what rights they have in virtue of being ethnic groups. We will have cause later to see what argument there might be for recognising ethnic 28

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groups whether or not they are actually being dominated (or, for that matter, in a dominant position). For now, though, we may notice some varieties of reactive interest-based ethnic groups, recalling the differences between types of wrong brought about through social categorisation which we observed in discussing racism. Anti-dominative ethnic groups may be brought together around resistance either to injustice, caused by exploitation say, or to the denial of freedom, as in slavery, colonial rule or more subtle attacks upon autonomy. Antiaversive groups may be seen as united in resistance to the denial of respect, or to the lack of freedom to enter social relationships with another group which arises from the denial of respect. We may note, however, that an ethnic group can be culture- rather than interest-based and yet be reactive. For a social categorisation that fails to acknowledge cultural distinctiveness may itself trigger group identification that focuses on precisely this distinctiveness.This expresses a demand for recognition, though that such recognition should be accorded does not follow simply from the facts as stated. It depends, as mentioned earlier, on a consideration of the kind of culture-based group that results from them.This is as perilous as it is unavoidable, as is illustrated by the way Conrad’s colonists blur over the ethnic distinctiveness of the different African tribes along the Congo because they see simply something uniformly unworthy of moral consideration. Against this intolerance and unimaginativeness Conrad subversively discerns cultural continuities between peoples which should lead us to treat the claims of others to equal recognition with sympathy. In the next chapter we shall investigate what such culturally-based claims are founded on. NOTES 1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness [1902] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 51. 2. Ibid. pp. 51–2. 3. An option that the colonist Kurtz, to whose station Marlow is travelling, has taken up by going native. 4. Cp. R. Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 22–3. 5. See M. Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), chs 2–4. 6. See R.Young, Colonial Desire (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 9. 7. See S. Jones, In The Blood (London: Flamingo, 1996), ch. 4. 8. M. Sarup, Education and the Ideologies of Racism (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham, 1991), p. 18. 9. Robert Miles, Racism (London: Routledge, 1989).

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10. See K. Malik, The Meaning of Race (London: Macmillan, 1996), ch. 6. 11. Cp. E. Stein, ‘Conclusion’, in E. Stein (ed.), Forms of Desire (New York: Garland, 1990), pp. 341–2. 12. See L. M. Alcoff, ‘Philosophy and racial identity’, Radical Philosophy 75 (1996), pp. 5–14. 13. See J. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. 26. 14. Quoted in Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 93. 15. Quoted in M. E. Chamberlain, The Scramble for Africa (Harlow: Longmans, 1974), p. 104. 16. Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London:Verso, 1976), p. 135. 17. The classification derives from Joel Kovel: see I. M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990), pp. 141–2. 18. See D. T. Goldberg, Racial Subjects (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 23. 19. See D. T. Goldberg, Racist Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), ch. 5. 20. For example O. C. Cox, Caste, Class and Race (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1948). 21. See Malik, Meaning of Race, pp. 91–100; Jones, In the Blood, pp. 173–7. 22. Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997). 23. Malik, Meaning of Race, ch. 2. 24. See Chapter 6 of the present work. 25. Goldberg, Racist Culture. 26. See P. Starr, ‘Social categories and claims in the liberal state’, in M. Douglas and D. Hull (eds), How Classification Works (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1992), pp. 162–3. 27. The objection to racism implied in this section is that differential treatment is based on ethically irrelevant grounds. The political issues arising from this are those that concern how such treatment should be counteracted – by affirmative action, for example. But, since these issues do not concern political arrangements as we are understanding them here, they are not taken up in this book. 28. See Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity, p. 23. 29. See Iris Marion Young’s account of the relation between oppression and social groups, Justice and the Politics of Difference, ch. 2. If people are oppressed on the grounds of their (inherited) membership of a racial category then they will form an ethnic group, as I go on to use this notion. 30. See G. R. Coulthard, Race and Colour in Caribbean Literature (Oxford: OUP, 1962). 31. Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Out of Africa: Typologies of nativism’, Yale Journal of Criticism 2 (1988), p. 164. See also Appiah, In My Father’s House (New York: OUP, 1992). 32. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (London: Verso, 1993). 33. For example J. Rex, Race and Ethnicity (Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1986), ch. 2.

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34. See M. Weber, ‘The origin of ethnic groups’ in J. Hutchinson and A. Smith (eds), Ethnicity (Oxford: OUP, 1996), pp. 35–40. 35. For example A. Smith, National Identity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 21. 36. See F. Barth, ‘Ethnic groups and boundaries’, in Hutchinson and Smith, Ethnicity, pp. 75–82. 37. See R. Jenkins’ Social Identity (London: Routledge, 1996), ch. 10. 38. As in the varied cultural characteristics regarded as crucial to Ulster Protestant identity discussed by A. P. Cohen in The Symbolic Construction of Community (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 56–7. 39. Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity, p. 44. 40. For example P. van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon (New York: Elsevier, 1979). 41. C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 259. 42. For example C. Calhoun, Nationalism (Buckingham: Open UP, 1997), p. 30; T. K. Oommen, Citizenship, Nationality and Ethnicity (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), p. 37. 43. N. Glazer and D. P. Moynihan (eds), Ethnicity: Theory and Experience (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1975), p. 5. Anthony Smith contrasts modernism with ‘perennialism’ – the view that social groups of some type provide the ‘essential building blocks of any conceivable new order’. See Anthony Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), p. 5. Primordialism then, in fact, explains perennialism. 44. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 8. 45. See A. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge: Polity, 1991). 46. S. Hall,‘Our mongrel selves’, New Statesman and Society, 19 June 1992, p. 6. 47. See T. Ranger, ‘The invention of tradition in colonial Africa’, in E. Hobsbawm and P. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983). 48. For example J. Rex,‘The nature of ethnicity in the project of migration’, in M. Guibernau and J. Rex (eds), The Ethnicity Reader (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), p. 270. 49. Ibid. p. 272. 50. Ibid. p. 271. 51. Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity, p. 46. 52. See Jenkins, Social Identity, p. 96. 53. T. W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race (New York: Verso, 1994).

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2 CULTURAL IDENTITY

qw

CULTURE

In V. S. Naipaul’s novel, A House For Mr Biswas, the hero, a Trinidadian of Indian extraction, dies at last in his own house, after a lifetime living with strangers or the family of his wife. But ‘how terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it . . . to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccomodated.’1 The house – ramshackle as it is – serves as a metaphor for Mr Biswas’s achievement of his own individual identity. It is an identity of great cultural complexity – that of a member of an immigrant family in a society itself diasporic, speaking English as well as Hindi, reading the Stoics, Samuel Smiles (the Victorian author of Self-Help) and English novels, and all the time attempting to avoid absorption into the regulated Brahminical life of his wife’s relations, which would be at once so easy and so unsatisfying for him. He struggles to hold the disparate elements together, constantly resorting to irony and parody. He suffers, as others seek to impose a cultural conformity untrue to his experience. Mr Biswas may serve, as this chapter will aim to demonstrate, for an image of cultural identity in general, not just that of immigrants and cosmopolitans. But what, we may ask, is cultural identity, and how is it relevant to political arrangements? It is, we may stipulate, the identity that someone has in virtue of possessing the cultural characteristics that they do; which obviously throws us back upon the 32

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question, ‘what is culture?’ Culture is a notoriously slippery notion. It is surprising, then, that political philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition who are concerned with questions about the political relevance of culture have devoted so little attention to the concept.Their unconcern tends, as we shall see, to mask the tacit acceptance of some very questionable assumptions. But now for some distinctions. First, we need to contrast the notion of culture as a people’s ‘whole way of life’,2 the totality of social practices in which they engage, with the so-called ‘ideational’ concept of culture as the ideas and symbols through which this life is represented and regulated. We shall follow the majority of social theorists in adopting the latter usage, since we do need to be able to distinguish culture as what guides behaviour from the patterns of behaviour which it guides. But this is because what we need to recognise as patterns of behaviour, as recognisable social practices, are those patterns that their practitioners recognise, and this depends upon the ideas of them that they have. Thus the ‘whole way of life’ conception of culture is, despite appearances, dependent upon the ideational one. Nonetheless the ‘whole way of life’ notion does force us to introduce a second distinction. It is a distinction between culture as what guides people’s behaviour, and culture as what makes them, in one supposed sense of the term, the particular people that they are. The ‘whole way of life’ notion was coined to capture precisely this latter idea, for it embodies a conception of a way of life as what picks out one particular people, namely as just those who are living it. This conception presents cultures as bounded wholes that correspond to the particular peoples individuated by them. This way of thinking of cultures as particularised to specific groups of people is not peculiar, however, to the ‘whole way of life’ notion. It is just as easy to think of ideational cultures as picking out peoples because their bodies of ideas and symbols are bounded totalities. I shall refer to cultures thus thought of as particular to peoples as ‘group cultures’, and to the peoples supposedly demarcated by them as ‘cultural groups’.3 Cultural groups are thus conceived of as bounded and, it is assumed, systemically so, such that cultural groups are supposed to form a system in terms of which peoples can be identified and demarcated, in one understanding of the term – an understanding distinct in principle from that of races or ethnic groups – as peoples. It is important to notice that in this usage a language group or a religious group, say, is not necessarily a cultural group. For, following LéviStrauss, a group culture is taken to consist of a group’s ‘multiplicity of 33


traits, some of which it shares, in varying degrees, with nearby or distant cultures, and some of which distinguish it more or less sharply from others.’4 One cultural group is demarcated from another by the fact that it exhibits a specific totality of such traits. It is not a group constituted by all those people possessing some given trait. People may in any case, as we noted, speak more than one language or practice no religion, so that these traits would not pick out systemically bounded groups. Now, according to this conception, cultural identity is thought of as membership of a cultural group. Its political importance is taken to arise precisely from the fact that it marks people out as members of such groups, so that the political claims arising from cultural identity are essentially claims to the continued existence of the groups which give rise to it, claims supported by reasons we shall investigate shortly. Just such a conception of culture is implicit in the use to which culture is put in the work of Will Kymlicka or Yael Tamir. Kymlicka takes ‘a culture’ to be ‘synonymous with “a nation” or “a people – that is, as an intergenerational community, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language and history’.5 Here it is the people marked out culturally that is taken, quite idiosyncratically, to be the culture. While Tamir agrees that ‘two people are of the same nation if, and only if, they share the same culture’, for her that culture is, rather more plausibly, ‘the set of specific features that enable members of a nation to distinguish between themselves and others.’6 In both cases cultural identity is equated with membership of a people, of which a nation is taken to be an example; that is, of a bounded group of a certain sort membership of which is, in general, incompatible with membership of other such groups. In the next section we shall go on to see how convincing such an account of cultural identity is, but we conclude this one by noticing that, despite its prevalence, it is at best optional. There is, of course, a usage of ‘culture’ which we have not so far remarked upon, sometimes referred to as the ‘humanistic’ sense, which would not even tempt us to think in terms of the cultural groups currently under discussion. In this usage culture – not a culture – is what some people, cultured people, have and others lack. It is, in Matthew Arnold’s words,‘to know the best that has been thought and said in the world’.7 Culture such as this is clearly located in the ideational sphere, but it is not a determinate body of ideas that marks one group off from another, for it is universal in its geographical scope and in its possible application; in principle, anyone can have some measure of it and be guided in their behaviour accordingly. It is what 34

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Mr Biswas sought to acquire in reading the Stoics and, less successfully, Shakespeare, rather than being confined to Indian epics, and it was this, in part, that made him what he was. And that has, it would seem, nothing to do with his being a member of some cultural group. INTEGRATION THEORY

What are cultural groups, as we introduced them in the preceding section, and why should membership of them be thought politically important? The idea that there are such groups and that mankind, at least when not disrupted by such seemingly artificial processes as colonisation, immigration and so forth, divides up into them, derives ultimately from the German Romantic, Herder. It is Herder who is acknowledged by anthropologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss as having originated the concept of culture by means of which they distinguish peoples culturally. For this, the concept of civilisation – connoting a set of general, universal, and transmissible abilities – had to give way to the concept of culture in its new meaning: it now signified particular lifestyles that are not transmissible.8 What results is, as we have seen, a supposed way of individuating the distinct peoples with such lifestyles. But why should we suppose that there are any social units to which such a concept of culture applies? The leading assumption behind the supposition is that particular cultures are systems of cultural traits, rather than haphazard assemblages. It is because they are systems that cultures can be individuated without arbitrariness.And what lies behind the assumption that cultures are systems is the larger one that the social groups they characterise are systems in their turn. The crucial ingredient here is that the social groups in question are integrated wholes. To include this assumption in one’s thinking is to adopt what has been called an ‘integration theory’9 of society, that is to say, to hold that social groups are relatively stable as a result of their elements being integrated into a functional system, maintained by some relevant consensus among its members. It is integration theory which is embedded in the supposition that there are cultural groups of the kind under discussion. Without it there would be no apparent reason to discern groups as each sharing a common but complex culture, rather than observing a wide variety of individuals with different cultural characteristics. The classic expression and defence of integration theory is the 35


functionalism of Emile Durkheim, which influenced Lévi-Strauss as well as several generations of British and American anthropologists.10 Functionalism holds that society is so organised as to maintain its own stability, so that the behaviour of individual members conduces to this end. Culture, then, as a force that guides individual behaviour, must itself have this integrative function. The model at work here is an analogy with biological organisms, which permeated German Romantic imagery and influenced Durkheim through its more empirically inclined English exponent, Herbert Spencer. Just like organisms, societies work to maintain their existence in a changing environment, and their parts – even individual members – are to be understood in terms of the way they contribute to this. But it is hard to see what there is to recommend the analogy as a model for society. There is, for example, no equivalent for societies to the theory of evolution, which is what accounts for the development of functional systems in the organic realm.11 Any decision whether or not to adopt the model has to depend upon its explanatory productiveness. It cannot simply be assumed. In fact the productiveness of the functionalist model is not high. This is partly because, unlike organisms, social systems which constitute functional wholes are difficult or impossible to individuate. Consideration of an example from Durkheim’s treatment of religion as an aspect of culture which plays its part in maintaining social stability illustrates the point. The religious rituals of Australian Aborigines, he maintained, functioned to draw members of the clans together and increase their solidarity. But in fact the life of Aborigines is lived in small hunting groups organised into tribes. The clans are widely dispersed formations playing no part in ordinary life and existing apparently only for ritual purposes. It is thus quite unclear why it is they, and not the groups or tribes, which require the solidarity supposedly maintained by religion.12 And this goes generally for functionalist accounts. It is not clear what constitutes a single cultural system, and when we characterise it in terms of the culture of a people there is no non-circular way of individuating that people in cultural terms.13 Despite its defects, however, the functionalist model continues to exercise an unacknowledged influence on the thinking of many Anglo-American political philosophers, particularly, though not exclusively, those of a communitarian turn of mind, of whom we shall have more to say in a later chapter. The model is at work in the sort of arguments often developed for giving recognition to cultural groups. These commonly centre on the benefits they offer the individual 36

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member, by contrast with the predicament in which she is placed as a result of her group’s dissolution. Margalit and Raz, for example, offer arguments for national self-determination predicated on the value of encompassing groups with ‘pervasive cultures’ – their term, somewhat over-simplifying, for what we are calling cultural groups. This value consists partly in the fact that membership of such groups ‘greatly affects one’s opportunities, one’s ability to engage in the relationships and pursuits marked by the culture’, partly in the ‘brute fact that people’s sense of their own identity is bound up with their sense of belonging to encompassing groups’. ‘All this’, the authors go on, ‘is mere common sense’.14 But the relationships on which individual well-being depends are, they aver, ‘culturally determined’. Perhaps so in some sense of ‘culture’. But why in the group culture sense that they espouse?15 Is not the threat to someone’s identity from the loss of group membership none other than the anomie that the breakdown of social integration menaces him with in Durkheim’s theory? This is far from a common-sense outcome, but an inevitable one from functionalist assumptions. This last point is also illustrated by Will Kymlicka’s liberal argument for minority rights from the value of cultural membership. Here Kymlicka says he uses the term ‘culture’ ‘to refer to the cultural community, or cultural structure, itself ’. He presents no argument for supposing that there are such ‘structures’, but he views them as providing ‘a context of choice’ which determines the range of options for members of cultural communities.‘The sense of belonging to a cultural structure and history’ he continues ‘is often cited as a source of emotional security and personal strength. It may affect our very sense of agency. This has been recognised . . . by sociologists.’16 Again the loss of such a structure threatens to produce anomie and powerlessness because the individual’s identity is seen as given by her place in it, so that when the ‘mechanism’ breaks down she becomes just an idle cog.17 Kymlicka’s use of the plight of American Indian groups to exemplify the threat reinforces this interpretation of it, for it was with just such indigenous peoples prior to colonial influences that anthropologists were wont to illustrate their functionalist analyses. That functionalism is covertly at work in Kymlicka’s thinking is evidenced also by his argument that national statehood is a justified demand of cultural groups because it protects their members’ cultural contexts of choice. First, it is the assumption of functional wholes that enables cultural groups – which, as we saw earlier, Kymlicka identifies with nations – to be identified as what provide these contexts, rather 37


than more local or more wide-ranging cultures. Second, it is functionalism which dictates that the cultural groups so picked out should be the entities to which state boundaries correspond; for any smaller polity, while it may work to protect the cultural context against external threats, will not be able to preserve it as a functioning whole. It is worth noticing that it is these same functionalist assumptions which generate the sharp distinction between internally initiated and externally imposed change that is crucial to Kymlicka’s nationalist argument. National statehood permits the former, but quite properly prevents the latter, for any change initiated inside the cultural group must originate from within its context of choice and hence cannot destabilise it, while any imposed from outside must draw upon a different context and is thereby bound to threaten the cultural integrity of the group. Without these covert functionalist assumptions there seems no compelling reason to suppose that such generalisations about the cultural benefits of national self-government can be sustained.18 CONFLICT THEORY

To give up integration theory is not necessarily to abandon the idea that there are cultural groups, understood as complete peoples picked out by sets of cultural characteristics; but it does require those that hold that there are such groups to give a different explanation of their existence and, in consequence, to offer a different account of cultural identity, albeit still in terms of membership of a cultural group. The kinds of account we will be looking at are those that see cultural characteristics as brought together in the construction of social groups, just as in the last chapter we looked at accounts of ethnic groups as socially constructed. On a social constructionist account the relation of a particular culture to the group it supposedly individuates is quite different from that posited by functionalism. Rather than constituting a discernible system which reflects the way that social relations within the group form a bounded totality, a culture is thought of as framed precisely with the effect of determining the boundaries of such relations. Rather, that is, than the group simply being recognised as such through its culture (which nonetheless plays a crucial role in its maintenance), people supposedly exist as a bounded group only because a culture is fashioned precisely to demarcate them from others. This leads, of course, to a different view of cultural identity. The cultural group member is not someone whose cultural identity reflects the functional system of the group as a whole, and who is necessarily 38

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threatened with internal dislocation if that system is radically disturbed. He is, instead, someone whose own cultural characteristics are not necessarily any more systematically organised than are the cultural materials through which the group is constructed.The threat to some single characteristic – the speaking of a particular language, say – may be very serious, but not because it inevitably leads to an anomic internal breakdown. Notice that this is not to deny that a group culture is internalised by group members, just as it is under functionalism. It is, that is to say, made part of a member’s personal repertoire of resources for coping with the world, rather than being part of the world with which she must cope. But that it is a culture specific to a particular group is here irrelevant to this internalisation. Religion, say, is similarly internalised but is not necessarily a characteristic of any particular group culture. What then is the role of culture in the construction of a group? No simple answer can be returned; it may well vary from case to case. Yet some features are common to all. First, as noted above by Yael Tamir, group culture can serve to enable members to distinguish themselves from non-members. It would be wrong, however, to characterise the whole of a group culture as being what serves the purposes of mutual recognition. Certain aspects patently do – one thinks immediately of national dress and such distinctive customs of a group as are involved in greetings, meals or other habitual social interactions. But other cultural characteristics which belong to the group and which may be involved in its construction or be peculiar to it do not at all obviously so serve: a group’s distinctive history, for example, need serve no public purpose of boundary demarcation. Rather it contributes to a member’s sense of membership, of being part of a distinctive group. It is important to distinguish this specific way in which a culture can contribute to ‘people’s sense of their own identity’19 from other cases in which a sense of identity has nothing to do with the recognition of group membership. In these cases culture gives one a sense of identity because its internalisation makes the outlook on the world which it provides one’s own – an outlook, that is, with which one can identify. There is a persistent ambiguity in such phrases as ‘a sense of identity’ which readily leads from the latter construction to the former, and thus reinforces the assumption that all culture is group culture. Why, we might ask at this point, should certain cultural characteristics be deployed to construct a bounded group? The general answer a social constructionist is likely to return will be in terms of the power relations which can be established or maintained by constructing this 39


cultural group rather than another one picked out by cultural characteristics of a different scope, or by constructing a given group by means of these cultural characteristics rather than by others. It is power relations, he will say, which are neglected in functionalist accounts of group individuation and group structure. Consider as an example the language of a group, which may seem on the surface to provide a cultural characteristic that serves for the mutual recognition of group membership.Yet, as is well known, dialects often shade off imperceptibly into each other so that it is not obvious where it can be said that one language ends and another begins.Where the boundary is drawn, and thus what groups are determined and, as a result of increasing linguistic differentiation, firmly entrenched, is often a matter of political decision and action. Thus Serbo-Croat was forged from a Croatian dialect shared with some Serbs to form a single language for the southern Slavs, and was recognised as such in the former Yugoslavia.20 Following the Federation’s disintegration the differences between supposedly distinct Serbian and Croatian languages have been emphasised. Changes in power relations have gone side by side with cultural change. To talk of power is almost inevitably to talk of conflict. It is thus unsurprising that the social constructionist account of group cultures contrasts with functionalist ones not only in rejecting integration theory but in espousing its opposite, conflict theory. Conflict theory stresses the ubiquity of change in society, rather than stability – change which results from pervasive conflicts within society for the possession of power. Marxist theories, as we shall see in a later chapter, may be regarded as a species of conflict theory. As such they have exerted a greater influence on continental philosophers than on Anglo-American ones and, through continental philosophy, on ‘cultural studies’, a discipline which aims to investigate the character of social groups and the identities sustained within them through their cultural productions. This, though it has an obvious relevance to the political claims of such groups and their resolution, has been largely ignored by AngloAmerican political philosophers, with the result that they commonly accept as the culture of a group what is presented as such for political purposes, without subjecting it to the sort of scrutiny that might call the claims based upon it into question. According to a conflict theory approach, however, it is unlikely that there will be some single unitary culture for a given group. Rather there will be a variety of cultural constructions resulting from contestation between conflicting interests in the formation or development of the 40

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group. Naipaul’s novel A House for Mr Biswas might itself be regarded as a move in such a contestation over the construction of Trinidadian identity. The movement leading to independence from colonial rule in 1962 had been led by Eric Williams and was based on images of black identity and Judaeo-Christian conceptions of deliverance from bondage. The movement was opposed by Hindu Indians in Trinidad who feared marginalisation. Indeed Naipaul’s father, the original of Mr Biswas, became the leader of a multiracial party opposing Williams. But their stance led to accusations of treachery. 21 Against this background Naipaul’s novel may be seen as asserting a different conception of Trinidadian identity in the culturally polymorphous figure of its hero. Yet the claims of this conception rest upon the force of its representation in this book and elsewhere. The conception is, however, in no way a specifically nationalist one. For though it locates Trinidadian identity in a motley of ill-assorted cultural characteristics, there is no way in which these characteristics pick out some group as Trinidadians or even, perhaps,West Indians.The aim, though part of a contest over group construction, is not itself to provide the characterisation of a particular cultural group so much as to undermine the very project of providing such a characterisation.We shall turn in the remaining part of this chapter to the different ways in which cultural groups may be constructed and to the political claims that may be associated with such different constructions. LANGUAGE

Naipaul’s contribution to the formation of a Trinidadian cultural identity was principally a literary one, and one made in the island’s official language, English. Evidently English itself could not serve to individuate a Trinidadian culture nor, as a matter of fact, could any creolised form of English. Yet it is language that is often viewed as what distinguishes one culture from another when the political claims of a distinctive cultural identity are in question. We need, then, to consider the basis for claims made on the basis of the possession of a common language. For a language may be thought to provide its speakers with their ideational culture. What are we to understand by this? In its broadest sense an ideational culture consists of people’s concepts and other publicly transmissible ways of understanding the world in which they live – the ‘webs of significance’ which they have spun, in Clifford Geertz’s phrase.22 Publicity is important here. Culture does not consist of the private contents of individual minds, as is 41


sometimes implied by those who contrast the public drawing of group boundaries with the ‘cultural stuff ’ contained therein,23 which may vary from member to member according to their different conceptions of the group. Such differences must be public ones if they are really to be thought of as cultural.We have noticed, however, that languages can in principle be counted differently from ‘webs of significance’, for example when languages are fairly fully intertranslatable or when the same language conveys different understandings (as with the British and the Americans, who are supposedly divided by a common language). The assumption that there cannot be such mismatches between languages and understandings, itself derived from Herder, should not too readily be made, though the extent of it in practice will no doubt vary from case to case. In polyglot cultures, which are the norm in Africa, the scope for intertranslatability may be very high. ‘Webs of significance’ make understanding the world and coping with it possible. They permit the formation of beliefs and regulate behaviour in the sense of constituting bits of it as recognisably purposeful activity. They do not specify what beliefs one should have or which actions might be performed. Ideas, in the sense of beliefs, including evaluative beliefs that regulate behaviour in this normative way, make up culture in a narrower sense, which we shall come to in the next section.The ‘humanistic’ culture, met at the beginning of this chapter, if narrowly construed in terms of the best that is thought and said, forms a subspecies of this category. But humanistic culture is generally more widely understood to encompass the best of aesthetic productions too, in which case it includes representations, broadly conceived, that invite responses different from assent or obedience.The importance of such aesthetic, and more generally affective responses should discourage us from according too narrowly a classificatory role to the ‘webs of significance’ that constitute culture in the sense under discussion. With these distinctions in mind we can ask what is the basis for political claims made in respect of people’s possession of their own language. Nineteenth-century attitudes to the Welsh language such as that of Matthew Arnold – ‘the language of a Welshman is and must be English’24 – led to demands that Welsh be accorded recognition and to a linguistically-based nationalist campaign for independence. Why, on the one hand, should a language be protected? Why, on the other, should it form a criterion for a separate political existence? Let us sceptically set aside those arguments touched on above, which see the 42

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loss of a language as leading to anomic breakdown.There is, however, another line which depends upon the presumption that different languages often do offer different understandings of the world. One reason adduced for the abolition of Welsh was that it could not express the propositions of politics and science. Conversely, peculiarly expressive powers in poetry have been claimed for it.The beauties of a language, the particular pleasures that its descriptive resources and melodies can provide, these are as much a part of an understanding of the world, of capturing and coping with it, as its more narrowly classificatory regimes. They suggest the same sort of argument for protecting the language as there is for preserving works of art, namely that it extends and enriches our understanding. This does not require – though importantly it cannot rule out – that others should learn the language besides its native speakers and come to enjoy its pleasures for themselves.The fact that there are those who can speak and enjoy it is enough, and their passing, like that of the last Cornish speaker, which gave ‘a moment’s distress’ to Arnold,25 is a loss for us all. A mode of human understanding has vanished. But there is a supplementary argument available here which stems from the way that the speaking of a language can contribute to one’s individual identity. If I am who I am in virtue of my outlook on the world, as well as my active role within it, then the speaking of a language, and possibly several languages, will be part of my identity since the language shapes that outlook. The language or languages in which I am ‘at home’ have a particular significance here. For the pleasure I can take in language is indicative of the involvement I have in the cognition of the world it gives me, and it is through such spontaneous involvement that who I am, by contrast with merely what tasks I must perform, reveals itself. It goes without saying that it is through the aesthetic potentialities of a language that such pleasures can be most keenly felt. It is crucial to grasp that these arguments in no way depend upon the speaking of a common language constituting people into a systemically bounded cultural group, nor upon the cultural identity that results from speaking it residing in membership of such a group. Perhaps, in order to protect the language, some group of speakers needs to be identified whose integrity and social relations must be preserved. The foregoing arguments are not concerned with the way that the speaking of a language might be taken to define a social group.Yet only if speaking the same language did define such a group could it serve as a criterion for some measure of political indepen43


dence or autonomy. Independent government, we should remember, is different from self-government.26 A group can be governed separately from others without governing itself, and a given kind of group – a linguistic one, say, can govern itself without being fully separate from another – while having, that is, a linguistic minority within its borders. The arguments for independence and autonomy are different ones. The former turn presumably on the desirability of those who are governed together being able to communicate efficiently, and that depends on their having shared understandings of what they deliberate together about politically. Yet arguably this demands not a single language, but only languages sufficiently intertranslatable over the range of topics that is relevant to political deliberation, or sufficient bilingualism, or a non-native official language, as English is in many ex-colonies.The aspects in which certain languages may differ expressively, for example their aesthetic aspects, may simply not be relevant to political organisation. Self-government for a linguistic group must be argued for differently, namely from the desirability of speakers exercising control of the culture based upon their language. This may, as a matter of contingent fact, be necessary to protect the language itself. Or it may be necessary, through the direction of education and cultural production, to control the way in which its speakers are represented in its literature or other artistic manifestations. That is to say, to control the way that speaking the language confers a cultural identity by determining what are the canonical examples of the language. Certain texts and literary forms will be made part of the language’s canon and others marginalised. And this, as we saw earlier, may be part of a broader process of group construction, which is contested between different protagonists. Certainly it is important that as wide as possible a range of speakers should control their language and literature; for them not to do so is to lose control of the ways their cultural identities can be framed. A particular political formation may inhibit this rather than being conducive to it. But it is far from clear that this amounts to a general argument for language-based autonomy.Whether it does so in a particular case will depend upon the way language speakers are distributed, the kinds of control they can exercise over the canon and the likely nature of a language-based state. There is no guarantee that political autonomy would not cause more harm through cultural regimentation and repression than is experienced in its absence. And the choice of language as the basis for an area of autonomy will serve some interests, and not others. It is not neutral or natural. 44

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VALUES

The culture of a collection of people may, as we saw earlier, be conceived of in terms not of a shared language but of a common body of beliefs, in particular evaluative beliefs. Let us turn, then, to the political significance of a shared ethical system, in the broadest sense of this notion as a system of norms regulating behaviour. It is worth distinguishing within an ethical system so conceived between those norms that actually figure in people’s reflective thinking about what to do and those which do not or at least do so much less largely.The former we can refer to as their moral standards; the latter, to borrow a term from the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, as their habitus27 – their habitual dispositions to act in one way rather than another, which are acquired through socialisation within a particular section of society but which remain largely unconscious. We can see in consequence that cultural identity, in the sense pertinent to our present discussion, can be conceived of either as someone’s moral standards or as their habitus. In the former case that identity may be self-declared, as when someone identifies herself through a religious affiliation that involves specific moral standards. In the latter it will typically not be, despite being recognisable for what it is by observers conversant with the relevant social nuances of class, region or whatever. In neither case does cultural identity depend upon membership of a cultural group in the now familiar ethnographic sense of a complete society systematically demarcated from others by its total culture. Thus according to a liberal view, of the sort to be discussed in a later chapter, wide variations in individual moral standards are containable within a single social group. It may, however, be argued that a group should be individuated largely by its moral standards as needing separate or self-government. Such political demands might be defended by claiming, respectively, that a common morality is needed to underpin a common law, and that the lawmakers must be drawn from those whose moral standards underpin it. We should notice that, while political demands cannot be grounded in some shared habitus in view of its largely unconscious character, nevertheless they may be assessed through comparing declared moral standards with actual habitual dispositions. Despite declared differences in morality there may be close agreement in habitus which will make a common life possible. A group that identifies itself in terms of its moral standards may, that is to say, simply be wrong about the sources of the social cohesiveness between its members. 45


There is, furthermore, some cause to be suspicious of the construction of cultural groups in terms of moral standards. This stems from the fact that there are at least two kinds of reason for adhering to a standard: one, the primary and, one might say, the ‘proper’ reason, is that adherence to the standard leads one to act aright: the other is simply that it happens to be the standard of one’s group, to which one desires to display allegiance through such adherence. The second, derivative kind of reason is clearly available only if there is a group constructed in terms of one’s standards, but it is a kind of reason which can undermine the first. For conformity to the standards of the group because they are its standards can be both an intellectual and a moral vice. It is an intellectual vice if one is no longer concerned to ensure that one acts aright, a concern that demands a responsiveness to the real character of the relationships in which one is involved and the claims they make on one. It is a moral vice of narcissism and decadent self-absorption, in which concerns with who I am replace a proper concern with what I ought to be. But the identity it generates is, of course, a phoney one, a substitute for sincere and serious moral identity. It is this kind of identity that Mr Biswas repudiates in rejecting the conventionalised Hinduism of his wife’s family. All this is, in theory, only a peril of group construction in terms of moral standards. In practice it is an ever-present and inescapable one. Succumbing to its temptations brings such cohesive power to a group as to induce almost all cultural group constructions to rely, in part, upon such moral standardisation. That said, the moral character of some groups is worse than that of others, and the worse it is the less their political claims for independence or autonomy will stand scrutiny. ‘But’, will come back the reply, ‘by whose standards is their moral character being judged? Presumably by those of some other group, in which case the judgement is rooted in that other group and irrelevant to the one being judged, so that proper political assessment cannot take account of supposed moral character.’ This cultural relativism has nothing to recommend it.To start with, its assumption that the moral standards which we bring to bear on our assessments are necessarily those of some cultural group or other is, as we have seen, untenable. But even if they were, the principal reason for supposing that they must be irrelevant to the group being assessed embodies a hidden functionalism. It is that the moral standards of a social group are just those needed to preserve its stability, so that any suggestion that the character of the group is morally defective is not one that can have an application within it.There may indeed be difficulties in 46

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applying such a suggestion, and there are large questions as to what it might be based upon, but a general cultural relativism grounded in functionalism is not plausible. Let us turn to groups constructed, instead, through a shared habitus, that is say through socialisation into ways of acting which are recognised as distinguishing members from non-members, even if what precisely it is that effects the distinction is not readily apparent. It is, perhaps, through these dispositions that people’s characters are shaped – that what are thought of, for example, as national characters are formed. Mr Biswas himself is caught up in a conflict of such dispositions.There is, on the one hand, the fatalism of the way of life brought from India; on the other, the individual striving that characterises the European lifestyle of the colonisers, which is overtly promoted by Samuel Smiles to whom Biswas turns in his reading. Might Mr Biswas’s problems derive from the fact that groups with different modes of habitus have been mingled, where they would have been better kept politically apart? Well, that is certainly not the message of the novel, which celebrates complexity and coexistence. The opposing, conservative answer will be looked at in a later chapter. But this is not to say that differences of habitus should not be taken account of politically, to avoid, for example, undesired and undesirable cultural assimilation. Such habitus may characterise a group and, through becoming something of which they are aware, enter its members’ sense of their own identity. This is one way of reading Paul Gilroy’s suggestion that black people recognise themselves as having a common ‘Black Atlantic’ identity, founded in a common experience of the slave trade.28 What this gives rise to is, on the one hand, an overtly erotic and irreverently carnivalistic music and, on the other, what Gilroy calls an ‘anti-productivism’, which the music expresses. In the behavioural dispositions which manifest this anti-productivism, ‘the black body is . . . celebrated as an instrument of pleasure rather than an instrument of labour’.29 This is a different way of constructing black identity from that of négritude, as we noted in the last chapter, but it also suggests different political stances, stances which can challenge European cultural norms from within, rather than embracing a separatist black nationalism. Differences in habitus are not clearly articulable and thus cannot with confidence be made the subject of explicit ethical debate, unlike the moral standards which they underpin. Perhaps they are better regarded as different ways of understanding the world, demanding the kind of respect for diversity and illumination which the different 47


understandings presented by different languages provide. Policies of assimilation withhold that respect, but the kind of protection that those with a different habitus demand is not that of separate existence as a cultural group. Rather they demand the kind of freedom from domination which leading a life in accordance with one’s habitus requires, and access to control of the institutions of socialisation which transmit it, for example educational ones. Habitus, unlike language speaking, cannot be prohibited, nor, unlike language again, can it be fostered, so cultural protection with respect to it is necessarily indirect and dependent upon political equality for those whose identity and self-esteem depends on it. HISTORY AND AUTHENTICITY

Another body of beliefs, different from evaluative ones, which is often taken to be partly constitutive of a particular culture30 is that which constitutes the history of a group. Here again, though, being part of some history, as an aspect of one’s cultural identity, does not depend upon membership of some demarcated cultural group. History can fulfil this identity-bestowing role for a variety of reasons. It can do so through someone’s identifying himself as the descendant of certain ancestors, as a current inhabitant of a place with an historic past, or as a participant in an artistic or intellectual tradition with its own historical succession of canonical productions. Each of these may form some aspect of a single individual’s cultural identity without implying membership of any cultural group. It is only if differences surface in contested constructions of a group to which political allegiance is demanded that any tension between these cultural identities need be felt. History enters individual identity because to have a sense of who one is requires being able to tell a story about oneself, and, furthermore, a story which relates one to others by connecting with the stories they tell about themselves. It requires, in short, making oneself part of a shared narrative.31 Such a narrative stretches into the past, and thereby becomes absorbed into a more general history. It is evident, though, how a group can be constructed in terms of a history that ties members into the group through engaging with and connecting together their personal narratives, so that their sense of who they are comes to depend upon membership of the group so constructed. This kind of group identification will tend to happen if their history is one in which other people cannot share, so that a system of discrete histories 48

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develops, as, for example, in the case of national history. Indeed, to construct such cultural groups is to induce people to engage in just those personal narratives that mesh together into these discrete group histories. History is appealed to in attempts to establish that a group identity is an authentic one. This, as we shall see, is a notion fraught with difficulty. But there is at least one commendable aspect of the demand that a group which confers identity should be authentic, namely that its history should be a true rather than a fraudulent or seriously distorted one. This demand for truth, natural as it appears, has, however, been contested. Many political philosophers32 seem to think that the truth of an historical narration is irrelevant if the story succeeds in constructing a cultural group to which people can give allegiance and in which they find fulfilment. But a grossly distorted history is an unsound basis for group formation. The temptation we noted in connection with groups based on shared values is succumbed to here, namely to abandon the epistemic requirements to which culture in general is answerable and embrace instead the reassuring security of membership. A myth – a story that is not taken as true, and thus enters into a personal narration not like one’s history, but like one’s fate – that is something that answers to different, and principally ethical, demands. But the fact that history can serve as myth is no reason to think that myth should serve as history. Similar strictures apply to the invented traditions that characterise many cultural groups.The Welsh Eisteddfodau, for example, have become a focus for the celebration of the Welsh language and they perpetuate the medieval meetings of bards, albeit after a period of desuetude and the decay of the bardic order. But the trappings of ancient Druidism with which they are invested lack any historical provenance, being the late eighteenth-century contrivance of a Glamorgan stonemason. They are designed to locate Welsh identity in a continuous Celtic history – an identity which is thereby ethnically opposed to that of the English and rooted in Welsh language-speaking.33 Now, as Hobsbawm has observed, the object and characteristic of ‘traditions, including invented ones, is invariance’.34 The social cohesion to which they are conducive is, designedly, an unchanging one, bolstered up against the pressure of change by their fixity and repetitiveness. In this respect, Hobsbawm notes, they differ from ‘customs’ which can accommodate changes, while retaining continuity by finding precedents for them. It is the inflexibility of such traditions, as well as the frequent fictitiousness of their credentials, which renders them objectionable as 49


bases for identity. For once again such an identity will not be grounded in a narrative which takes account of how things are, with all their changes and complexities, but in a comforting illusion of things being as they ought to be. This indicates how, even when traditional practices are genuine, the demand for ‘authenticity’ in culture can be open to criticism. Despite the cultural mix which he celebrates as a novelist in A House For Mr Biswas, Naipaul as a reflective thinker sometimes views as worthwhile only those cultures which maintain a continuity with their origins.35 Such a culture he finds amongst the so-called Bush Negroes of Surinam, the descendants of slaves who had escaped soon after transportation. ‘No other Negro artform in the Americas’, according to the art historian Philip J. C. Dark, ‘of which some African traditions survive, can claim the vitality, the lack of eclecticism and the freedom from other cultural influences of Bush Negro art’.36 But why should such continuity and cultural ‘purity’ improve people’s political claims, even, as Naipaul seems to have thought, to nationhood? An interesting smaller-scale example in which authenticity, as so understood, is taken to be required for political claims concerns Australian Aboriginal demands for control of sacred sites. Recognition of these demands requires evidence not only of present belief and practice, but of continued and relatively unchanging use.37 Yet this is to impose a test of authenticity – of a culture’s really being people’s own – that is external and divorced from the use they make of it in their current circumstances. In another mood Naipaul grasps this; for example in criticising the policies of the Congolese leader General Mobutu in opposing European influences: Mobutu says . . . that he doesn’t have a borrowed soul any longer; his particular black thing is ‘authenticity’. Authenticity. . . is rejection of the strange, the difficult, the taxing; it is despair.38 A culture is authentic in a quite different sense from this if people can themselves control it and adapt it to the world they find themselves in; if, that is to say, they can modify their narratives and adapt the rituals in which they participate socially. Two related axes of assessment are being involved here. One is a culture’s amenability to its bearers’ wishes, which is incompatible with its imposing an identity upon her, as either imperialising cultures or rigidly autochthonous ones may do. The other axis is a culture’s flexibility, necessary not only as we have already seen, for epistemic and ethical acceptability, but, as we can now observe, for its amenability to popular will. 50

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It is authenticity in this literal sense of self-written culture that is what cultural nationalism, and analogous political claims of cultural groups, ought to depend upon.The kind of case that might be made for such a claim can be illustrated by glancing at Timothy Brennan’s study of the culture of another Caribbean country – Cuba.39 Brennan argues that Afro-Cuban music is, for all its cultural mix, an indigenous music of the Cuban people, in particular the Cuban poor. It is, he suggests, what defines them as Cubans, and it does so because they see it as their own. It is a symbol of resistance and, more precisely, of resistance to the cultural commodities marketed by American capitalism from whose consumption they are excluded. Yet Afro-Cuban music is a developing, not a static form, moving through rumba and mambo to salsa. Nor is it any way exclusive, its rhythms being constantly exported to the USA and elsewhere. The sort of socialist politics that Brennan takes this musical culture to symbolise and the values which it expresses are also exportable and thus, he implies, not open to the kinds of criticism that might be directed against the politics and values of many other cultural nationalisms. There is, then, a case for allowing that the identity associated with this culture inextricably involves group membership. It would, in this case, be a national identity, with all the political implications which that has and which we have so far skirted around. Yet it is a group identity only because membership of a group is, for particular political reasons, required in order for people to maintain control of the culture that shapes their grasp of the world. HYBRIDITY

In this chapter I have outlined some of the factors that can contribute to someone’s cultural identity. I wanted to argue that cultural identity does not depend upon membership of a cultural group, as if people divided up neatly into such units, and I have rejected functionalist arguments for such a view and the political positions that go with them.Their mistake is to assume that the various elements of culture do necessarily hang together in ways that serve to individuate discrete groups, or, in the cases where they do individuate such groups, that they necessarily hang together in coherent and cognitively satisfying wholes. Rather these elements are often simply put together to individuate groups without constituting coherent wholes independently of this political function. But culture is, of course, a social product. Here I wanted to stress the way that the possession of power is bound up with the formation of cultures, and the importance of people 51


retaining control of their culture if it is indeed to be their own and to confer upon them identities they can properly acknowledge. This does not necessitate the existence of cultural groups in which control is vested. Insofar, however, as political action is needed to secure control, such bounded groups are likely to emerge, with all their attendant dangers of exclusion and rigidity. There are tensions here between the different requirements that culture needs to fulfil to be able to offer a satisfactory identity. Perhaps we can investigate them best by turning back to Mr Biswas and seeing how his is an example of what Stuart Hall calls ‘diaspora identities’, which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference. One can only think here of what is uniquely – ‘essentially’ – Caribbean: precisely the mixes of colour, pigmentation, physiognomic type; the ‘blends’ of tastes that is Caribbean cuisine; the aesthetics of the ‘cross-overs’, of ‘cut and mix’ . . . which is the heart and soul of black music.40 Syncretism such as this provides, Hall implies, a model of cultural identity in general that is more satisfactory than one that views it as reflecting a relatively homogeneous culture and, as such, not readily amenable to development and individual change. There is much in this with which to agree, but there are dangers of vulgarising the model. Identifying them may bring out what cultural identity is not, or at least should not, be. First, the celebration of ‘mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that,’41 of which Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, is the most notorious exponent, can suggest a conception of culture as consisting of a range of commodities from which the consumer makes his selection: food, furnishings, films and funky music from all over the world.While this no doubt captures an aspect of the cultural experience of many in the contemporary world, it cannot be the whole story of their identities.To start with we cannot just choose our culture. Much of it is simply given. The language we learn as children for example; the habitus we acquire then; the facts about us around which a narrative and history must be woven. Much of this can be supplemented and changed, but it provides the unchosen background for our choices.The consequences of this should not be exaggerated. It does not entail that there is a core of one’s culture which is invariant, for this may change as an indirect result of one’s choices. Nor that there is any aspect of one’s culture that one must simply accept. For if the 52

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question arises as to whether one should accept it then there is already the possibility of choosing otherwise. Such choices are indeed made possible by just such exposure to different cultural influences, which is why exposure is resisted by some of those opposed to Rushdie’s vision of cultural mélange. Second, however, the picture of mélange suggests that the cultural elements available are already shaped by others, as consumer products in a capitalist economy are, so that the only scope for cultural control is that of individual choice.Again this is a misleading picture, not only as to the facts but as to the politics of culture. Culture, as against the cultural products in which it is manifest, is the creation of individuals interacting socially, transmitting and receiving the elements of culture. But by the nature of these social relations some will have more power than others in determining these cultural outcomes.To gain control of one’s culture is to apply this power, and this, where it occurs, is a collective rather than an individual achievement. Gaining this power may require the formation of cultural groups with organised structures of cultural control.The members of these groups may, as Bhikhu Parekh writes of the immigrant Muslims opposed to Rushdie,‘solace each other within a common fellowship and lead individually heteronomous lives within an autonomous group’.42 It is unclear whether such a trade-off between individual choice and collective control of culture is inevitable; some degree of tension seems to be so. Third, and connectedly, the mélange picture leaves no room for the idea of cultural elements coming together into a rich and complex whole: they are only the ‘hotchpotch’ resulting from individual choice. We do not need to embrace functionalism nor to think in terms of bounded cultural groups to formulate the notion of an identifiable culture, differentiated from others.To speak of the cultures of fifth and fourth century Athens or of Renaissance Italy, say, is to individuate cultures in this manner. For here ways of thinking and writing come together with rituals, art and architecture in ways that unite these elements into an organised whole. But participation in such cultures in no way established group identities, for their participants did not identify themselves by reference to these cultures, which played a different and deeper role. Cultures such as these provide scope for a comprehensive and unconfused grasp of reality, rather than a merely episodic and disconnected one. It should not simply be replied that under the chaotic conditions of modernity such a unified grasp of the world has become impossible. For the desire towards it is an inescapable part of what it is for a subject of thought and action to seek epistemic 53


and normative unity in her dealings with the world. It is part of what it is to have a single identity, in the way in which Mr Biswas triumphantly achieves it, though his is an individual achievement, not part of a wider social one. NOTES 1. V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 13–14. 2. This notion seems to derive from Herder; see G. Jordan and C. Weedon, Cultural Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 565. 3. I shall assume that the condition of self-identification mentioned in the last chapter is satisfied. 4. C. Lévi-Strauss, The View From Afar [1985] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 17. 5. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: OUP, 1995), p. 18. 6. Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993), pp. 67–8. 7. Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma [1873] (London: Nelson, undated), p. 16. 8. Lévi-Strauss, View From Afar, p. 26. 9. See R. Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 1959), p. 159. Dahrendorf attributes the insight underlying the distinction between integration or consensus and conflict or coercion theories to David Lockwood. 10. A sophisticated example in political theory is provided by the work of Niklas Luhmann, for example The Differentiation of Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 11. A recent sociobiological account is offered by W. G. Runciman in The Social Animal (London: Harper Collins, 1998). Following Herbert Spencer, Talcott Parsons supposed there were laws of social evolution: see his Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Eaglewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966). For succinct criticism of Spencerian analogies see D. Lee and H. Newby, The Problem of Sociology (London: Hutchinson, 1983), pp. 73–80. 12. This objection is drawn from E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: OUP, 1965), pp. 58–65. 13. Cp. Margaret Canovan’s criticism of Tamir, Nationhood and Political Theory (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1996), pp. 53–4. 14. A. Margalit and J. Raz,‘National self-determination’, repr. in W. Kymlicka (ed), The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: OUP, 1995), pp. 86–7. 15. Cp. J.Waldron,‘Minority cultures and the cosmopolitan alternative’, repr. in Kymlicka, Rights of Minority Cultures. 16. Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: OUP, 1989), pp. 164–6, 167, 175.

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17. Kymlicka quotes such a description of cultural groups approvingly: ibid. p. 176. 18. I have gained clearer insights about Kymlicka’s position through conversations with Matthew Festenstein; see his ‘New Worlds for Old: Kymlicka and Liberal Nationalism’ (forthcoming). Festenstein points out that Kymlicka could provide other reasons for the cultural benefits of national self-government, for example the greater sympathy co-nationals would have for one’s cultural needs. But such contingent considerations scarcely seem to capture the vital importance for the individual that Kymlicka attaches to self-government. 19. Margalit and Raz, ‘National self-determination’, p. 87. 20. See E. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge: CUP, 1990), pp. 54–5. 21. See B. King, V. S. Naipaul (London: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 11–12, 153–7. 22. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Hutchinson, 1975), p. 5. 23. For example A. P. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 18–19, 55, 73. 24. Quoted in F. Delaney, The Celts (London: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 172. 25. Ibid. p. 171. 26. See P. Gilbert, The Philosophy of Nationalism (Boulder: Westview, 1998), p. 18. 27. See R. Harker, C. Mahon and C. Wilkes, An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 10–12. Habitus may seem to lie on the ‘whole way of life’ rather than ideational side of culture. It consists, however, in transmitted patterns of activity, not in activity itself, and thus provides the background to more articulate ideas. 28. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993). 29. Paul Gilroy,‘One nation under a groove’, repr. in G. Eley and R. G. Suny (eds), Becoming National (New York: Oxford UP, 1996), p. 362. 30. For example by Kymlicka in Liberalism, Community and Culture, p. 165. 31. The importance of narrative identity is emphasised by Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), and interestingly discussed by M. R. Somers and G. D. Gibson in ‘Reclaiming the epistemological “other”: Narrative and the social constitution of identity’ in C. Calhoun (ed.), Social Theory and the Politics of Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 32. See Gilbert, Philosophy of Nationalism, pp. 160–5 for instances and discussion. 33. See P. Morgan, ‘The hunt for the Welsh past in the Romantic period’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: CUP, 1983). 34. Introduction to ibid. p. 2. 35. See F. Mustafa, V. S. Naipaul (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), pp. 77–87. 36. P. J. C. Dark, Bush Negro Art (London: Alec Tiranti, 1954), p. v. 37. See J. M. Jacobs,‘“Shake ’im this country”: the mapping of the Aboriginal

55


38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

sacred in Australia’, in P. Jackson and J. Penrose (eds), Constructions of Race, Place and Nation (London: UCL Press, 1993). Quoted in King, Naipaul, p. 117. T. Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997), ch. 6. S. Hall, ‘Cultural identity and diaspora’, in P. Williams and L. Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1993), p. 402. Salman Rushdie, quoted and discussed by S. Hall in ‘The question of cultural identity’, in S. Hall, D. Held and T. McGrew (eds), Modernity and its Futures (Oxford: Polity, 1992), p. 311. Bhikhu Parekh, ‘Between holy text and moral void’, New Statesman and Society, 23 March 1989, p. 31.

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3 NATIONALITY

qw

NATION AND STATE

‘How’s poor ould Ireland, and how does she stand?’ ‘She’s the most distressful country that ever yet was seen, For they’re hanging men and women there for the Wearin’ o’ the Green’1 So runs a snatch from a famous Irish Catholic song lamenting the suppression of national identity by the English. But what is national identity,2 and why is its expression – or suppression – of such importance? The nationality that appears on a person’s passport or identity card is normally their membership of a state, or, for short, their citizenship.3 Yet this legal conception of nationality is not the one we are concerned with here. The grievance of the Irish was for a long time that they lacked a separate nationality in this legal sense, because they lacked a separate state. But this did not prevent them insisting on their separate national identity, their membership of a separate nation or, in other words, of a separate people, in a sense of the term apparently different from those already considered. To ask what is national identity is, then, to ask what nations are, and why membership of them should be thought to have the significance it does. The equivocal nature of the concept of nationality provides, however, a clue towards answering this question. Primordialism about nations – the view that nations are an unchanging locus of attachment 57


in human social life – is quite untenable.The modern concept of the nation is inextricably linked to the concept of the state, so that nationality connotes membership of a nation only because it can connote membership of a state. For, while it may seem as if just the converse held, and nationality could bear the sense of citizenship only on the assumption that all citizens are members of the nation, it is the idea that there could be a body of people corresponding to the members of the state and yet collected together by more than just this fact that is vital to the concept of the nation.The concept is a modern one because so is the state, understood as an organisation exercising sovereignty over a specific territory and doing so on behalf of its inhabitants generally. And the concept of the nation as a body of people in some sense properly correspondent with the state by virtue of the way they are collected together is available only when there are such states. While it does not follow logically that there were no nations prior to states – since things can exist prior to our having a concept of them – it is quite unclear what the force of claiming that there were such prior nations would be. For the social formations that may be conceived of as nations can only reasonably be presumed to have developed in response to the growth of states.4 Whatever collectivities existed before the state did not exist as nations, even if they existed as some other sort of social collectivity, for example ethnic groups. Following in the footsteps of Hegel, Max Weber grasps the need to specify a connection between state and nation in order to characterise the latter: ‘a nation,’ he wrote, ‘is a community of sentiment which would adequately manifest itself in a state of its own.’5 Weber here indicates a principle that collects people together – their community of sentiment – into a body of a sort such that a separate state is the appropriate form for its political organisation. This, I suggest, exemplifies the general relation between state and nation: a nation is a people collected together on the basis of some principle which makes a state appropriate for them.6 The relevance of national membership to political arrangements is immediately evident on this account: at least one way of justifying such arrangements is to reveal them as providing a nation with its state. But it is not yet clear why a state should be appropriate to a nation, and that, I suggest, will depend on the specific principle of collection employed in marking out a nation. A state is appropriate to a community of sentiment, say, because only such sentiments can provide the cohesion required for a successful state. Notice, however, that the account suggested here is not quite equivalent to the stronger claim which theorists like Ernest Gellner 58

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take nationalism to make, namely that ‘the political and national unit should be congruent’.7 This stronger claim implies that it is only for a nation that a state is appropriate, which too quickly rules out, for example, federal states where constituent nations that could appropriately have had separate states have opted for a single one. Members of a federal state are not collected together by anything more than this fact, whereas supposedly they are collected together into its constituent parts by something more, namely by whatever it is that collects them into nations.The general connection between what collects people into nations and what makes statehood appropriate to them is, I claim, constitutive of nationhood. Nationalism is the claim that there are nations as so understood and that the legitimacy of states ultimately depends upon their relation to nations. On this account national identity is in a certain sense inherently political. It is the kind of identity which collects some people together with others in a way that makes statehood appropriate for the collectivity. In claiming a certain national identity – Irish rather than British, say – they are making a political claim, however rooted in inescapable facts that claim is taken to be: When laws can stop the blades of grass from growin’ as they grow, And when the leaves in summertime their colour dare not show Then I will change the colour too I wear in my caubeen; But til that day, please God, I’ll stick to the Wearin’ o’ the Green.8 National identity can seem natural and immemorial, but its political character shows it is neither of these things. National consciousness is a response to specific political circumstances, though to what sort of circumstances exactly is a matter of dispute amongst theorists, some, like Hobsbawm, locating its origins in the American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century,9 others like Liah Greenfeld in political developments in sixteenth-century England.10 It is, in any case, a consciousness of different things, of different ways in which people may be collected together in their differing circumstances. It is for this reason that it should not be viewed as a consciousness of some pre-existing collectivity. Of course people can be regarded as forming collections in accordance with some principle or other prior to any recognition of the fact. But that these collections are putatively nations depends upon the possibility of mobilising them for the political 59


purposes for which nations are mobilised.Though one’s own national identity is not necessarily something of which one is aware, this does not imply that it is something that can sensibly be imputed to people who lack the possibility of such awareness, an awareness that is inescapably bound up with a sense of its political repercussions. Now the political character of national identity has an immediate consequence. It is that, because politics always involves a struggle for power, a national identity is a contestable identity.While some national identities are relatively well-sedimented into a stable and permanent political system, none is immune to contestation and thus none can be avowed or ascribed without fear of contradiction or emendation. Contestation can happen in two ways. One concerns people’s nominal identity: by what name they are to be called – Irish, say, or British.This involves a dispute either as to what nations there are – as to whether there was a separate Irish nation, for example, or whether there is a Kurdish one – or as to which of two or more presumed nations someone belongs, Irish or British, Kurdish or Turk. In both kinds of case there may be a dispute as to which national name someone should bear. The other kind of contestation, related in an obvious fashion to the first, concerns people’s affiliative identity, as we may think of it: with which other people are they affiliated in having the national name they do? Does someone incontestably Irish share their nationality with the descendants of English settlers in Ireland or are these to be excluded from the Irish nation? The boundaries of the nation undergo more or less constant contentious revision, so that it is indeterminate what affiliations someone acknowledges in avowing national identity. The result is that national identity itself is no fixed thing, but the subject of contested interpretations.11 Irish maids, love none but those Who wear the jackets Green12 enjoins another Irish song. But who wears those jackets and what is it to wear them? To whom, indeed, is the injunction addressed? Songs like this continue to be sung as an expression of an Irish national identity whose scope is still unresolved. NATION AND PLACE

A state exercises sovereignty over a specific territory. A national identity is, therefore, in normal circumstances a type of local identity. It identifies someone in terms of their relation to a specific place, as a 60

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town or village identity also does. There are exceptions, as when members of a nation have, in actual fact or in their tales of origins, moved from the whole or a part of some homeland, and still, perhaps, carry the name of it.The nation may yet lay claim to it. More usually the territory to which a claim is laid is that in which its inhabitants reside, so that their local and national identities correspond. A claim that statehood is appropriate for a people is, I have suggested, essential to the supposition of their nationhood. Now since a state requires a territory it follows that the argument for statehood a people produces must involve an argument for territory, and generally for some specific territory which they claim. This is a critical aspect of the way that national identity can bear on political arrangements, namely on the boundaries that are drawn around states.What kind of argument, then, might a people use to claim some territory? The Ulster Protestant poet John Hewitt offers one such argument: We have rights drawn from the soil and sky; the use, the pace, the patient years of labour, the rain against the lips, the changing light, the heavy clay-sucked stride have altered us . . . this is our country also, no-where else.13 A right to land is claimed on the strength of people having worked it and in the process having become adapted to it. The first part of the argument derives from John Locke’s idea that someone acquires land because ‘he hath mixed his labour with it’.14 The Ulster Protestant claim to the north of Ireland would, on this construction, be based on aggregating together their individual property rights so acquired. So far no specific features of their national identity are involved in the claim. The second part of the argument, however, takes a different tack: it is the land of Ireland that has altered them, and this is taken both to confirm their right – to underline their personal investment – and to affect their national identity in a way that gives them a specific claim. Ireland has conferred this local identity upon them: that they are identified as of the place gives them a claim to it. And this is therefore one form, at least, of Irish identity, whatever their British allegiances. Thus Hewitt goes on to write, in the same poem: This is my home and country. Later on perhaps I’ll find this country is my own. There are, then, two distinct arguments for territory here, the first so far independent of national identity, which is differently established, 61


the second dependent upon it as a local identity. The first, in brief, is that the land belongs to them, the second, one might say, is that they belong to the land – and to do so constitutes a part of their identity. Neither argument is, of course, the argument from indigenous occupation that other inhabitants of Ireland, north and south, may advance. In ‘Among the Ruins’, a story by the Donegal writer Brian Friel, one of the characters, Joe, ignores his family’s protests at the way he’s driving through the Irish landscape: At this moment, I don’t give a damn . . . with Meenalaragan and Pigeon Top on my left and Glenmakennif and Altanure on my right. Because these are my hills, and I knew them before I knew wife or children.15 That they are his hills forms his identity, which is here a local and thereby a national one. A national right to land is presupposed in a people’s identifying themselves as those to whom it belongs, not, as in the previous case, as individual property, but as the land that they collectively have made their own through inscribing their culture in it. The place names in Friel’s story are essential to establishing this relation. It is not just that the hills themselves belong to Joe and his countrymen; it is that the hills are his under these names, because his people have bestowed them in the course of their engagement with the land, an engagement which has given them a history and folklore. The relation is illustrated in Friel’s play Translations which centres around the renaming of Irish places by nineteenth-century English surveyors.Their Irish informant, Owen, speaks: . . . we call that crossroads Tobair Vree . . . Tobair means a well . . . but what does Vree mean? It’s a corruption of Brian . . . and an old man called Brian, whose face was disfigured with an enormous growth, got it into his head that the water in that well was blessed; and every day for seven months he went there and bathed his face in it. But the growth didn’t go away; and one morning Brian was found drowned in that well. And ever since that crossroads is known as Tobair Vree – even though that well has long since dried up.16 The surveyors, unusually, decide to retain the Irish name. For the most part, however, they change the names into English ones so that, as one of the Irish characters comes to admit, ‘we must learn where we live. We must learn to make them our own.We must learn to make them our new home.’17 The renaming has destroyed, or, completed by the loss of the Irish language, will destroy, the original relation to place 62

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that supplied a certain sort of Irish identity and, with it, a claim to the land. The message of Friel’s play is that this identity needs to be reconstructed and, by implication, its concommitant political claims re-established in the light of new realities. The situation here described is, I am suggesting, paradigmatic. Indigenous land claims do not principally depend on historic entitlements to property, which later settlers have wrongly violated, as some who support such claims, like James Tully,18 have averred.They depend, rather, upon the way that cultural identities are shaped by the sort of relation to the land that I have indicated. But this has important repercussions. For as we have seen earlier, cultural identity does not necessarily consist in membership of a well-demarcated cultural group, still less a nation. It follows that if an argument for territory derives from the desirability of preserving certain cultural identities then it need not necessarily require the political recognition of a cultural group. But unless it does, while it may support policies that tend to maintain a culturally based relation to place, it can scarcely serve to delimit the boundaries of states. For this would require the recognition of groups as entities to which certain bounded territories might correspond.19 The same strictures could be levelled at the second sort of argument involved in John Hewitt’s lines discussed at the start of this section: the first has different failings, to be touched on later. None of this implies that there might not be good arguments for conceding a state of a certain geographical shape and size to a cultural group in order to protect its members’ identities. It is just that no general case from their indigenousness may be available: that the real strength of their cultural attachments to place – shorn of sentimentality and self-deception – needs to be gauged, and that the possibility, indeed the likelihood, of change in that relation needs to be acknowledged. Under the pressures of ‘modernisation’ imposed on people by agencies not their own, it is inevitable that clear-sightedness about these matters may be in short supply, and those in this plight cannot be blamed for lack of it. Indeed an appeal to a vanishing cultural relation to a people’s place may be a legitimate tactic against further oppression and dispossession.Whilst such facts generate arguments for empowering and respecting indigenous peoples, they generate no general case for a culturally based territorial nationalism.20 THE NATIONAL COMMUNITY

What binds people to a place is, often enough, the community whose collective life is shaped by it and made possible by its resources. It is 63


perhaps unsurprising that the nation’s relation to its territory has been seen in similar terms, and the nation regarded as itself a kind of community, as in Weber’s definition. No recent account has been more influential than that of Benedict Anderson, who defines it as ‘an imagined community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’.21 It is limited because sharply demarcated, by some principle of collection, from other nations and sovereign because appropriate for statehood.What is required is for it to be a community we shall come to in a moment, but it is,Anderson allows, an imagined one, in the sense that ‘in the minds of each [member] lives the image of their communion’,22 rather than that communion simply being a fact of their relationships. It is by means of such images that people are collected into nations demarcated from one another. Anderson’s idea is one that the Irish Nationalist poet George Russell – ‘A E’ as he called himself – had expressed much earlier: ‘a nation exists primarily because of its own imagination of itself ’.23 Russell had a clear perception of the different and competing forms such imagination may take: We would no Irish sign efface, But yet our lips would gladlier hail The first-born of the Coming Race Than the last splendour of the Gael.24 An image of the Irish community derived from the Gaelic past is here challenged on behalf of those, like the Anglo-Irish Russell, who would not fit easily into it. For Ireland is a country where the indigenous and the descendants of settlers are intermingled. The question arises whether the latter are part of the same nation as the former, and it arose particularly acutely around the time of Irish independence. It was this controversy that erupted, notoriously, at the first performance of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. For what Synge sought to do was to create a Hiberno-English idiom available for an inclusive vision of the Irish community, but rooted in the rhythms and imagery of Gaelic. It was condemned by Gaelicists, including D. P. Morgan, as a ‘hopeless half-way house’25 and by others such as John Ervine as a fake – ‘contrived literary stuff, entirely unrepresentative of peasant speech’.26 But it caught on, as providing not only a vivid image of a community whose social relationships can be conducted in this speech, but also, somewhat comically, as Synge’s detractors complained, as a vehicle for the stage Irishman who came to be encountered in real life. What is imagined in imagining a 64

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community, then, is a way of conducting a certain set of social relations; which is why the invention – or the acceptance as canonical – of a mode of speech provides an image of community, for speech is the vehicle of relationships. It determines their form and expresses the values that can be realised in them.The spoken language in which one feels at home is, to borrow a pertinent phrase of Yeats,‘a house Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious’.27 The relational character of community brings out a characteristic of national identity we have not previously noticed. If one’s nation is a community then to be a member of it is to have a societal identity, in the sense that it is to be identified in terms of one’s social relationships, just as to have a familial identity is. Indeed the family often serves as a model of the nation, and some suppose it always does.28 But its societal character sharply distinguishes nationality, even under the family model, from ethnicity, despite the underpinnings of both in kinship. For ethnicity is not a societal but a non-societal identity. It identifies people in terms of their inherited characteristics quite independently of whether they maintain the appropriate social relations with other members. National identity, by contrast, conceived of as membership of a family-like community, requires just those relations, even if it is thought that it is within a group related by kinship that they will be maintained. The family provides only one possible image of the national community. But it brings into prominence two features common to all communities. First, a community is a body of people collected together, at least in part, through the possession of common goals. Second, it is one cemented by at least some degree of mutual concern, which follows from the fact that the goals in question are not just coincident but collectively pursued, so that the success or failure of each member bears on that of the others. One way of putting these features together in an image drawn from families is in the notion of fraternity. Thus Anderson argues that the nation is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.29 Yet there is an evident tension here that needs investigation. For on the one hand Anderson regards relations of fraternity as evidence of 65


community; on the other, he allows the possibility of ‘actual inequality and exploitation’ which seem to count against it. How can this be? Anderson is at pains to stress that an imagined community might for all that be a real community:‘all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined.’30 A nation exists, he believes, when enough people imagine themselves to form one, for their imagining creates a community, makes possible social relations of a sort for which there may be no prior basis.Yet this opens up a possible gap between those antecedently existing relations and the relations brought forth from the national imagination. It is this gap, surely, which led Ernest Gellner to maintain that ‘nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.’31 Anderson takes issue with the implication of fabrication and falsity here. But surely Gellner is right. If real relations of community do not antecendently exist then the national imagination does fabricate them, and it fabricates them on the basis of a false perception of those relations. In a word, it fakes them, to hark back to the criticism of Synge’s imagined Irish community. The question that needs to be asked about Synge’s picture is whether it is in this sense a fake. However powerful its effect, did it misrepresent continuing social relations in rural Ireland with the aim of evoking inadequately grounded sentiments of national solidarity? There are various ways in which the image of a national community can misrepresent social relations, which are to be judged by the actual behaviour of people and thus by their implicit intentions as much or more than by their explicit and self-avowed ones. People can suppose themselves to be willing to associate with those they are not in fact willing to associate with, or to be unwilling to associate with those with whom they already enjoy successful communal relations. There may be common goals and concerns among them, but the scope of these may not correspond to that of the supposititious nation. Alternatively, there may be no effective common goal because a sub-group within the larger whole is able to determine the agenda and control others for sectional advantage: oppression and exploitation render the ‘horizontal comradeship’ of the nation illusory. For such comradeship to be attained, the dominant sub-group would either have to modify its behaviour or be excluded from the national community. If it claims to be part of the nation then the former is what it should do, and in any case this option exemplifies a better way of life than the latter, since it makes possible the values of concord and co-operation. For statehood to be appropriate to them and thus to qualify as a nation a people must at least aim at and be able to realise such values.32 66

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The criticism of the vision Synge sets forth was less that the rural society it depicted provided a quite inaccurate image of an Irish national community than that, through articulating those communal relations in the English language, it made a place for the Anglo-Irish descendants of the colonists on an equal footing with that of the indigenous Gaels. Indeed, it represented an attempt by Synge, Yeats and the other Anglo-Irish members of the literary set to control the agenda of nation-building to their own advantage. ‘It was,’ as Terry Eagleton observes,‘precisely because they were a politically dispossessed group that the Anglo-Irish could shift, as though by way of compensation, to cultural production’, with the effect of recasting Ireland ‘as a society with its hereditary rulers still secretly in command.’33 Such an assessment would require careful appraisal. It is at least not obvious that the sort of society which has in fact been achieved in the Republic of Ireland is not one where the Anglo-Irish find themselves on a more or less equal footing with the indigenous Irish (in all their variety), a society achieved in no small part through Anglo-Irish imaginative productions. Perhaps the aims of Synge and his colleagues should not be too readily dismissed. People want to be a community, and thinking of themselves as one helps to make them so. But what is desired may not be realised, and since it is comforting to believe one really is part of a community this fact may be disguised from one.The national imagination is prone to self-deception, for the values it aims for are easier to envision than to realise, the facts easier to falsify than to confront. To realise communal values on a national scale is, however, the result of such imagination.And if that imagination is potent and has the sort of resilience that stems from clear-sightedness as to the facts, then it may produce relations of a sort that did not previously exist. Each national claim to instantiate them, though, must be considered on its particular merits. CIVIC NATIONHOOD

What Anderson’s account of nationhood brings out is that there are many different styles in which the nation can be imagined.These can be classified in various ways.A distinction between such styles that has gained widespread currency is that between civic and ethnic conceptions of nationhood, or as it is sometimes misleadingly put, between political nations and cultural nations34 or between western and eastern nationalisms.35 In each case the former category is usually seen as somehow modern and enlightened, the latter as anachronistic and 67


given over to dark and dangerous forces. In truth, however, both can be viewed as products of different facets of what crystallised as Enlightenment thought. The civic conception, broadly speaking, sees people as essentially rational calculators, able to grasp the advantages of statehood and to enter into it by mutual agreement. The ethnic conception, paradigmatically, sees them as collected together willy-nilly into collectivities classified by some science, be it biology, philology, or whatever, so that political arrangements should be shaped to correspond to them. In each case it is because people accept the relevant assumption of modern thought that they see themselves as forming nations in accordance with it, occupying standpoints unavailable prior to these ways of thinking. The civic conception, so called, comprises, in fact, a wide range of different accounts of nationhood. Indeed it is unclear that it really constitutes a single conception at all, for there are two quite distinct features that are taken to characterise it.These are readily combinable, but can as readily come apart. One is an emphasis on the state as that which unifies people and which in normal circumstances they can grasp as advancing their common interests. A state with given boundaries is appropriate to them and makes them a nation precisely because a rational assessment of their situation will reveal it to do so. It was, of course, just such a view that motivated those who opposed Irish independence to deny an Irish nationhood separate from that of the rest of the United Kingdom; and it continues to motivate the denial of a separate Scottish or Welsh one. It also underpins the view that in western Europe, and in the ex-colonial territories that inherited western European institutions, nations are formed by states rather than vice versa.36 And on this view it is only radical dysfunctionality in the state, resulting from its attempting to hold together in one polity interests which cannot be so combined, that would call into question the correspondence of the state and nation, and render it irrational for members of a state to continue to support it.37 It should not be thought, however, that to reject this sort of civic view of the nation – the statist view, as we may call it – is to embrace an ethnic one. Yeats, Synge and their circle rejected it in embracing Irish nationalism. But not only did they not accept the Gaelic ethnicism of many Irish nationalists, they arguably rejected ethnicism itself and opted for a civic view of the Irish nation of which they took themselves to be a part. In doing so they inherited an older Anglo-Irish tradition of thought which held a view of nations as voluntary associations, peoples collected together with common goals because they 68

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chose to come together thus.This emphasis on individual choice is the other feature of the civic conception that I flagged up earlier. But on the interpretation being considered here it is actual choice that is in question. British rule in Ireland failed to make it one nation with Britain on this view, because the Irish chose not to associate with the British in a shared statehood. Rather they formed a separate Irish community because of their choices, possibly implicit, to associate together in the business of life. It is such voluntary association that makes shared statehood appropriate to them. The classic exposition of this sort of view is Ernest Renan’s: ‘the existence of a nation is a daily plebiscite’.38 It is people’s continuing to choose to associate that holds the nation together. Why they choose to do so is unimportant, so long as it is not for reasons merely ephemeral and opportunistic. A plebiscite is not an opinion poll which canvasses people’s views as to the facts of their collective identity. Whatever the current facts of the matter concerning the unifying characteristics of some people may be, they are, in Renan’s view, strictly irrelevant to national identity. For national identity is the upshot of the choices people make which create an association, not of antecedent facts about them, be these facts about their social relationships or anything else. It is easy to see, then, why Yeats and Synge thought of the Irish nation as something to be fashioned by influencing those choices, rather than as something already formed by facts of culture, ancestry or long-standing communal relations. These methods of nation-building bring out, as well, how misleading it is to compare civic with ethnic nationalism in terms of a contrast between the political and the cultural, as John Hutchinson, for example, does.39 Both involve cultural factors and either can be focused on culture to a greater or lesser extent. According to a civic conception, an association of a kind for which statehood is supposedly appropriate can be formed and maintained with the explicit purpose of creating or sustaining a state, or similar political organisation. But it need not be so. It can be formed to protect or develop a culture, though this will inevitably involve political methods. What may thus be referred to as ‘cultural nationalism’ can, nonetheless, share the same features as much civic nationalism, since it picks the cultural group out as that for which statehood is appropriate because a state is taken to be legitimate only when it corresponds to a voluntary association. What differentiates it from the more explicitly political version is that the association for which it is appropriate is focused around a culture, as what is required, other things being equal, for effective political communication and 69


social cohesion. This last assumption is, perhaps, what explains the importance for Yeats and Synge of an English-language depiction of Irish communal relations, for a purely Gaelic one would have excluded many of their kind, and others too, from equal political and social participation. Yet the other, more explicitly political civic nationalism is not devoid of cultural objectives. Even if so-called ‘cultural’ nationalism is thought of as aiming at ‘a moral regeneration of a community’,40 explicitly political nationalisms could qualify for the label, whether they are of the statist or associationist varieties. For states have their own more or less distinctive political cultures – their understandings of how politics should be conducted and of the values that can be realised politically – and the ‘moral regeneration of a community’ may well be viewed as requiring the realisation of such values – of, for example, civil liberties or social justice. Indeed, whole traditions of liberal or republican thought have, as we shall see in later chapters, been founded on such beliefs, though these traditions are paradigmatic of civic or ‘western’ conceptions of the nation and of the state’s relation to it. No doubt not all civic nationalism is so benign: neither an emphasis on the unifying state nor an emphasis on the role of individual choice ensures it will be. Usually, as indicated earlier, civic nationalism is seen as civilised, its ethnic counterpart as potentially barbarous. Those, like Hutchinson, who assimilate this distinction to a political/cultural one, however, sometimes entertain, as Anthony Smith expresses it, ‘the idea of sundering the nation from the political domain and returning it to the sphere of culture and civil society from which it sprang, as if thereby the evil genie could be sealed once again in his proverbial box.’ Without the aim of separate statehood, they suppose, ‘the fangs of nationalism are . . . drawn’.The considerations of the last paragraph should lead us to agree with Smith in arguing that the cultural and the political cannot be so easily separated. ‘The development of any nationalism’, as he puts it,‘depends on bringing the cultural and moral regeneration of the community into a close relationship, if not harmony, with the political mobilisation and self-determination of its members.’41 What this way of putting it brings out is that, however attenuatedly civic in form a national identity may be, it will mostly be, for all that, to some degree at least, a cultural identity.

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ETHNIC NATIONHOOD

The ethnic conception of the nation also manifests a considerable diversity of forms. Along one parameter these differences concern the qualifications required for membership of the nation. Some so-called ethnic nationalisms are overtly racist, demanding descent from the same, generally indigenous, people as other members, so that those of a different ancestry, and often of a correspondingly different colour, physiognomy or body type, are automatically excluded. Others require only certain stipulated cultural similarities, a shared language, say, resulting from early socialisation. In both sorts of case, and other analogous ones, national identity is unchosen and, indeed, not even a possible subject of choice. It is this, crucially, which distinguishes ethnic from civic nationalism; for, on the latter, national identity is presumed either to have been chosen, in associationist versions, or at least to be what it would be rational to choose, in statist ones. None of this contradicts the point noted earlier in discussing ethnic group membership more generally, that ethnic national identities involve self-identification. Since the ethnic nation is taken to be a group that has a conception of itself as distinct from others then self-identification must be involved. But this is a process of collective group construction that by no means implies the possibility of that self-identification being something which can be freely chosen by each individual member. Another parameter along which ethnic nationalisms vary concerns whether they offer societal or non-societal accounts of nationhood. Although the rhetoric of the community is prevalent in most nationalisms it only plays an effective role in nations characterised in terms of their members’ social relations. But if nations are thought of as peoples with a shared ethnicity, then they are not being characterised in terms of such relations, since ethnic group membership consists simply in individual possession of the racial or cultural features required. If such groups do, in large part, constitute communities – and certainly not all who share their ethnicity need participate in them – then this will be because of their members’ supposed affinities, generated either by nature or by culture. It is, for example, presumed that the indigenous Irish, racially or culturally akin, will be able to enter communal relations from which the descendants of the English, lacking such kinship or cultural rapport, will necessarily be excluded. It is important to see that it is assumptions like this, highly questionable as they are, that are needed to make a case for statehood being appropriate to nations conceived as certain sorts of ethnic group. For there 71


is no obvious reason why the mere existence of such groups should have any political consequences. Ethnic conceptions of a societal sort identify an ethnic group as a nation in virtue of its forming an appropriate sort of over-arching community. Civic nations, as we saw, formed communities through being suitably unified by shared government or through appropriate sorts of voluntary association. The ethnic community, however, is both pre-political in that its unity is prior to, and not derivative from, government, and involuntary in that the pursuit of its common purposes and concerns is neither explicitly chosen nor something valued because recommendable to reason as an instrumentally worthwhile social practice. It is the ethnic community in particular which is, in these respects, comparable to the family – an institution which is entered involuntarily, whose collective goals are scarcely even articulated and whose mutual concerns are unreflectively motivating. This is the model for the community as Gemeinschaft, to use Ferdinand Tönnies’ famous terms,42 rather than Gesellschaft – the traditional society in which concord supposedly flows from unthinking adherence to norms and the spontaneous suppression of individuality, by contrast with the modern one in which conflicts of individual interest have to be deliberately allowed for and resolved through formal arrangements. Nineteenth-century theorists like Tönnies harked back nostalgically to such communities, generating the functionalist theories of culture we have already touched upon.43 Such thinking influenced the nationalist movements of the time. More recent experiences have tended to reverse the relative evaluations. If there really are any ethnic nations with the communal character they claim, then whether it is appropriate for them to have separate statehood is a question to which we should, perhaps, expect no general answer. We shall later look at attempts to provide one on the part of so-called communitarian philosophers. But one factor which may be thought relevant to such a question, and which we should look at now, is the issue of how firmly rooted the ethnic nation is in a continuing communal life shaped by its distinctive culture. On this matter historians have advanced widely divergent views.While agreeing that the nation is, as we have seen, an essentially modern phenomenon some, like Anthony Smith, have nevertheless taken many nations to have originated in pre-existing ethnic groups.44 The appeal of the national identities they involve is, then, derived in large part from that of those ethnic identities. Faced, for example, with absorption into some polity, membership of which involves a purely civic identity, 72

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members of such an ethnic group seek to retain or return to their own richer and more deep-rooted culture, to build a state upon familial sorts of social relationships, rather than on cooler, more calculative civic ones. It is nations which have such strong ethnic roots, it might be claimed, which have a particularly good case for statehood. Other theorists, however, have denied either the real existence or the importance of such ethnic histories. Etienne Balibar expresses the position thus: No nation possesses an ethnic base naturally, but as social formations are nationalised, the populations included within them, divided up among them or dominated by them are ethnicised – that is, represented in the past or in the future as if they formed a natural community, possessing of itself an identity of origins, culture and interests which transcends individuals and social conditions.45 Balibar labels this as ‘fictive ethnicity’, a feature in the construction of national identity which prevents it from appearing to its bearers as simply an arbitrary denomination. So long as its fictive character is disguised, such an ‘ethnicity’ is seemingly sufficient for all the nationbuilding work that Smith’s supposedly pre-existing ethnic identities can perform. Nor is it clear that a community with only fictive ethnic origins has less claim to be recognised in suitable political arrangements. For if its claim is dependent, as presumably it must be, upon its ethical character as a community then its history is relevant only as bearing on the resilience and realism of its communal relations in the face of current facts. It may be that fictive ethnicity is symptomatic of more wide-ranging illusions, but over-concentration on some actual past may be just as capable of inducing myopia. That, after all, is the point of George Russell’s disinclination to ‘hail . . . the last splendour of the Gael.’ It involved the ‘Followers of Tradition’, he wrote, in worship of an extinct fire In which they drift beyond the verge Where races all outworn expire.46 The truth or falsity of Gaelic tradition is not to the point, for, as Russell sees, the crucial question is whether there are any current communal relations corresponding to the community imagined in traditional terms. Even the continuing history of an ethnic group does not guarantee its continuance as a community. And a community that 73


enjoys such a history has no stronger political claims, other things being equal, than one which does not. In the contemporary world it is exceedingly unlikely that where there are social relations on a national scale which are, arguably, communal in character, they do in fact correspond in scope to any ethnic group, whether constituted by an historical or a fictive ethnicity. The real relations of interdependence between people which can generate collective goals and mutual concerns derive from their coming together in a territory to wrest a living from it. So long as they have the necessary means of communication and of conflict resolution there is no obvious reason why different ethnic identifications should stand in the way of co-operation and shared commitment. That is why, perhaps, ethnic identification is often taken to be based on a common language, as necessary for effective communication, or on common values, as supposedly required to prevent irresoluble conflict. But not only are these assumptions linking community to ethnicity highly questionable, it is not evident that ethnic identities are necessarily constituted by such factors: ethnic differences can be constructed within populations that share a language and values. In these circumstances the construction of an ethnic national identity must look prima facie like a device to justify unwarranted exclusions. In its own time, the injunction Irish maids, love none but those Who wear the jackets green47 may have served as a fitting warning against collaboration with an enemy or oppressor. At other times such sentiments can be chillingly intolerant, forbidding fraternisation where fraternity is properly due. Political arrangements doubtless have to take account of such nationalist sentiments. But these arrangements may represent no more than a separation of hostile forces. It is quite unclear that they reflect a principled way of dividing up territories between those most fitted for shared government. NOTES 1. Anonymous, repr. F. O’Connor (ed.), A Book of Ireland (London: Collins, 1959), pp. 96–7. 2. I use ‘nationality’ and ‘national identity’ synonymously unless otherwise indicated. 3. Exceptions are the ‘personal nationalities’ registered for example in the former Soviet Union and discussed in Chapter 8 below.

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4. This growth arose from the decay of feudalism and so requires no explanation in terms of pressure from pre-existing nations. See H. Schulze, States, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), ch. 1. 5. Quoted in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 176.The idea derives from Hegel: ‘In the existence of a nation the substantial aim is to be a state and preserve itself as such’: See G.W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, tr.William Wallace (Oxford: OUP, 1971), p. 279. 6. For extended discussion see P. Gilbert, The Philosophy of Nationalism (Boulder:Westview, 1998), ch. 1. 7. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 1. 8. O’Connor, A Book of Ireland, pp. 96–7. 9. E. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge: CUP, 1990), ch. 1. 10. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1992), ch. 1. Both sorts of view are criticised by Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood (Cambridge: CUP, 1997). 11. This is not just a matter of vagueness at the boundary of a concept’s application, for disputes about the boundary derive from the differing principles taken to collect together members of the nation. 12. ‘The Jackets Green’ by Michael Scanlon, in D. O’Keefe (ed.), The First Book of Irish Ballads (Cork: Mercier, 1955), p. 96. 13. John Hewitt, ‘The Colony’, quoted and discussed by Seamus Heaney in Preoccupations (London: Faber, 1980), p. 147. 14. J. Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government [1689], §27. 15. Quoted in U. Dantanus, Brian Friel (London: Faber, 1988), p. 24. 16. B. Friel, Translations (London: Faber, 1981), pp. 43–4. 17. Ibid. p. 66. 18. J. Tully, Strange Multiplicity (Cambridge: CUP, 1995). For an extended discussion on this point see D. R. Lea, ‘Aboriginal Entitlement and Conservative Theory’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 15 (1998), pp. 1–14. 19. The same strictures could be levelled at the second sort of argument involved in Hewitt’s lines discussed above.The first has different failings, to be touched on later. 20. For an assessment of the dangers of a culturally based territorial nationalism see Tom Nairn’s ‘The curse of rurality’ in his Faces of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1997). 21. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), p. 6. 22. Ibid. p. 6. 23. G. Russell, The Living Torch (London: Macmillan, 1939), p. 183. 24. G. Russell, ‘On Behalf of Some Irishmen Not Followers of Tradition’, in B. Kennelly (ed.), The Penguin Book of Irish Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 314. 25. Quoted in D. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Cape, 1995), p. 174. 26. Quoted in D. Kiberd, Synge and the Irish Language (London: Macmillan, 1993), p. 174.

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27. W. B. Yeats, ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’, in Selected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1968), p. 103. 28. For example Ross Poole, Morality and Modernity (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 100–5. 29. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 7. 30. Ibid. p. 6. 31. E. Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1964), p. 169. 32. Of course it may be that no kind of group is such that statehood is especially appropriate to it, in which case the basis for nationalism’s division of peoples collapses. 33. T. Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 300, 306. 34. Due to Friedrich Meinecke. See P. Alter, Nationalism (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), p. 8. 35. Due to Hans Kohn. See ibid. pp. 9–10. 36. Cp. A. Giddens, The Nation State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity, 1985). 37. The assumption here, which I am not attributing to sociologists like Giddens, is evidently a Hobbesian one. 38. E. Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’, in A. Zimmern (ed.), Modern Political Doctrines (London: Oxford UP, 1939), p. 203. 39. J. Hutchinson, Modern Nationalism (London: Fontana, 1994), p. 17. 40. Ibid. p. 41. For elaboration of this idea see K. Nielson,‘Cultural nationalism, neither ethnic nor civic’, The Philosophical Forum 28 (1996–7), pp. 42–52. 41. A. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in an Global Era (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), p. 13. 42. See F. Tönnies, Community and Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1963). 43. See P. James, Nation Formation (London: Sage, 1996), pp. 127–9. 44. For example in Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era, ch. 3. 45. E. Balibar, ‘The nation form’ in G. Eley and R.G. Suny (eds), Becoming National (New York: Oxford UP, 1996), p. 140. 46. Kennelly, Irish Verse, p. 313. 47. D. O’Keefe, Irish Ballads, p. 96.

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PART II

qw Theories


4 COSMOPOLITANISM, CONSERVATISM AND LIBERALISM

qw

COSMOPOLITANISM

‘The Roman world,’ we are told,‘was a polyglot, cosmopolitan world, with freedom of movement for civilians, and a great deal of mobility for people in the administration . . . second-century governors of Britain, for example, can be shown to have come from Africa, Spain, Cilicia (in modern Turkey) and Dalmatia (in modern Yugoslavia) as well as from Italy.’1 The modern world is quite otherwise, and government by those with identities relevantly different from those of the governed, in respect of ethnicity, culture, territory or whatever, is regarded as improper, not just because it may be imperial, but because it is alien government. Is there any justification for such an attitude? This is simply an instance of our general question: are such identities relevant to political arrangements? In the ensuing part of the book we shall look at the way different theories in political philosophy might approach this question. Administrative attitudes in the Roman world were influenced to a considerable extent by Stoic philosophy.‘My nature’ wrote the secondcentury emperor Marcus Aurelius, ‘is rational and social; and my city and country, so far as I am Antoninus, is Rome, but so far as I am a man, it is the world’.2 This neatly encapsulates Stoic political philosophy. Human nature is social, so that, as Marcus Aurelius puts it 79


metaphorically, ‘that which is not good for the swarm, neither is it good for the bee.’3 For what is good is to be discovered by the use of reason, and there is ‘one law, one common reason in all intelligent animals, and one truth’.4 This common rational nature has political implications: ‘just as it is with members in those bodies which are united in one, so it is with rational beings which exist separate, for they have been constituted for one co-operation’.5 Human beings, that is to say, are elements of nothing less than a single worldwide system motivated by a shared sociability and properly operating under the same laws because these are discoverable by a common human reason. This rationalist cosmopolitanism, as we may call it, is epitomised in the figure of the ‘citizen of the world’. According to cosmopolitans, one’s fundamental identity is given by membership of nothing less than the whole human race. And the rationalist version glosses this as membership of the company of those ruled by reason: one’s individual identity is given by the ends, and the procedures for their attainment, which reason offers everyone, adapted to the circumstances in which one finds oneself. It is, therefore, essential to cosmopolitanism, as I am understanding it, to regard a person’s group or other collective identity as irrelevant to political arrangements, in the sense that these cannot be justified by reference to it. For group identity has no fundamental ethical role, social relationships, according to the rationalist account, being properly governed by reason. The cosmopolitan goes further, then, to urge that political arrangements ought to take no account of group identity as something generating special ethical obligations, except, perhaps, insofar as this is a generally beneficial way of parcelling out obligations.6 One’s fundamental obligations are to one’s fellow human beings, and political arrangements should be structured around this insight. This may or may not require world government, but it certainly will not imply a system of, for example, ethnic nation-states with their limited and non-rationally based loyalties. Cosmopolitanism with similarly rationalist foundations came down to the modern world through Stoic influences on the thinkers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, in particular Kant. It continues to have its advocates, perhaps most notably the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum.7 Kant had himself noted the way in which the expansion of trade created interdependencies which were incompatible with exclusion and antagonistic polities.‘The spirit of commerce’ as he put it,‘cannot co-exist with war’.8 Now, the post-Cold War capitalism spread across the world can be presented as a global system for which world citizenship is a more appropriate primary identity than any 80

COSMOPOLITANISM, CONSERVATISM AND LIBERALISM

more restricted one. The global interdependencies that exist generate obligations that cannot be limited in scope to the members of some one ethnic or national group, say. And this is taken to imply that one’s fundamental identities cannot be analogously restricted. Contemporary cosmopolitans can accept this conclusion without deriving it from any rationalist conception of the source of social obligation or of the essence of human identity.To adopt such a rationalist conception attracts, at the very least, a charge of cultural imperialism. It is a quite specifically located European conception. One cannot expect members of other cultures to share it or the ethical deliverances it supposedly vouchsafes.‘What kind of cultural imposition is it’, as Judith Butler asks, by way of criticising Nussbaum, ‘to claim a Kantian may be found in every culture?’9 To base a general prescription for world politics upon such foundations is almost as blinkered as suggesting, as people did when it still existed, that the British Empire might ‘contribute all that has hitherto made its maintenance worth while to the making of an even wider and more beneficent system of world government.’10 It has scarcely done that. It would be similarly optimistic – or arrogant – to suppose that the specifically European ideals of citizenship which incorporate rationalist assumptions can provide a model for a world citizenship that can ground new political arrangements globally.11 Anti-rationalist cosmopolitans will stress the culture-specific character of the ethical insights on which the imputation of global obligation depends and reject the obscure metaphysics involved in deriving them from the universally accessible deliverances of reason. The difficulty, however, is to provide an account of a kind of identity whose claims trump those of group identities, to parallel Stoic accounts.What is it, for an anti-rationalist cosmopolitan, to be a citizen of the world? One answer is that it is to be a member of the same moral community, that is, one where the same insights underlying global obligations are available.12 The difficulty is to flesh this out convincingly. One possibility is to hold that as a matter of fact there is enough correspondence between the ethical systems of different cultures to identify, for example, duties to strangers as the basis for global obligations. It is, to say the least, doubtful whether any such universally acknowledged ethical insights do obtain. A more promising line is to interpret the worldwide moral community as a dialogic one. This is the approach particularly associated with Jürgen Habermas,13 whose ‘critical theory’ owes more to Kant than to its more immediate Marxist antecedents. It posits the notion 81


of a community consisting of those who interact in the tackling of common problems and who thereby enter a dialogue as to the best solution of them. They will for very general epistemological reasons, Habermas believes, adopt norms that demand the reaching of consensus and the inclusion of all interested parties, and this in turn requires that their antecedent ethical insights be open to re-examination and revision. Membership of such a community thus confers an identity which transcends more limited cultural ones and this is the identity on the basis of which one figures as a participant in politics. It is, however, a controversial question whether this position escapes the charge of importing substantive ethical values into the identification of the norms of dialogue, in particular ideals of fair and peaceable decisionmaking. Not all cultures seem to subscribe to such procedures. Habermas might reply that there is at least no other way of conducting politics, and that this way provides no grounds for the kinds of exclusion which a system based on group identity produces. But such a reply simply leaves the theorist, like Charles Beitz for instance, a cosmopolitan by default, arguing for world citizenship because no more limited kind can be defended.14 This argument leaves open the possibility that no specific sort of political arrangements at all can be defended, and a fortiori not cosmopolitan ones, whatever they may turn out to be. CONSERVATISM

The natural antithesis of cosmopolitanism is conservatism. For while the former seeks to justify a set of particular arrangements on the basis of how people ought to act, the latter condemns them as utopian because they fail to take account of how people can act. Group identity is relevant to political arrangements, in the eyes of conservatives, not because we can argue why this or that group is entitled to its own state, say, but because we can argue why this one is apt for viable statehood, and that is not. And this aptitude will depend upon facts about what those with certain identities can and cannot do by way of political co-operation or political allegiance. It was in the eighteenth century, as, in part, a reaction to the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment, that conservatism developed a political theory to justify political arrangements – usually the existing ones – on the basis of such supposed facts. The alleged facts are, for example, those of natural affinities and antagonisms, which the cosmopolitan, of course, disputes, possibly arguing that they are the result of the state system, not a reason for it. This is 82


the line pursued by the Anglo-Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith, who goes on to ask: Is it not very possible that I may love my own country without hating the natives of other countries . . . Most certainly it is; and if it were not . . . I should prefer the title of the ancient philosopher, viz a citizen of the world, to that of an Englishman, a Frenchman, a European, or to any other appellation whatever.15 This type of factual quarrel is unlikely to prove profitable unless some reasons of principle for accepting the one position or the other are put forward. We have seen how a cosmopolitan might ground world citizenship in a common kind of identity. What kinds of grounding for his preferred political arrangements does the conservative propose? For all the conservative’s avowed mistrust of theory, a number of principles not directly susceptible to empirical confirmation can be seen to underlie his answer.The first is realism16 – the doctrine that there are groups which will pursue their own comprehensive interests at the expense of others, and thus that political arrangements must be made to take account of this. The state system is seen by conservatives as embodying just such arrangements, which is why it is the system we actually have, for it is the duty of states to pursue the interests of the groups they represent.Any sensible politics will simply accept this fact about the system and use it to maximise group interests and minimise the danger of serious loss of power to protect them. The second conservative principle is nationalism; as Anthony Quinton puts it: ‘for conservatives the primary object of political loyalty is the nation’.17 It was not always thus. Earlier conservatives often defended empires. But this is because at that time they constituted, or so those conservatives could have argued, groups which pursued their own interests through the elaborate hierarchical structures into which their members were locked in relations of allegiance. Nations, conservatives claim, are what now do so, and perhaps, through loyalties more fundamental than those of empires, always have done. The conservative move towards nationalism may also reflect a development of theory. Earlier conservatives stressed, in a Hobbesian spirit, the importance of institutional structures in shaping groups with political claims. More modern conservatives have tended to emphasise more broadly social factors as being what give groups coherence. Nations, it is claimed, have such a social coherence, whether induced by institutional homogeneity or other causes. Nations, then, are the groups which need to be represented by separate states.There is little room in 83


conservatism for identities other than nationality to play a role in political arrangements. What sort of national identities play this role will depend precisely on what kind of membership generates the loyalty required for a group to pursue its interests in the way postulated by realism. Conservatism need give no general answer to the question of what kind of membership will do this. Hostile to theory, it can hold that this is just a matter of observation. But typically it will locate nationality in membership of groups about which certain claims can plausibly be made as to why they give rise to loyalty. The obvious conservative answer is that nationality consists in race. But how are we to understand this? Conservative rhetoric often turns disagreeably on the supposed evils of racial mixing – ‘the word “integration” sums up’ said Enoch Powell, ‘a dangerous delusion’.18 The indefensible biologism which this suggests is, however, no necessary part of conservative doctrine. For these evils can be held to stem from defying a ‘natural prejudice, and a desire for the company of one’s own kind’ which ‘arise inevitably from social consciousness’,19 rather than from some biological laws. ‘Race’ as the conservative apologist Roger Scruton understands it,‘denotes a continuity across generations, based in kinship and inter-marriage, but supported also by consciousness of common descent.’20 It is roughly equivalent, in other words, to what we have termed ethnicity. It consists of self-identifying ethnic groups whose membership is given not constructed, social not political, which generate the loyalties of nationality, loyalties which extend to the dead who have gone before as well as to the yet unborn. These sorts of loyalties are what make a group apt for viable statehood. The sense that, as David Miller, himself no conservative, puts it, ‘because our forebears have toiled and spilt their blood to build and defend the nation, we who are born into it inherit an obligation to continue their work,’21 is itself a characteristically conservative sentiment. It points us towards another feature or to another way of characterising a kind of group that conservatives take to be apt for statehood, namely one with a certain sort of common history – a history with which members can identify themselves.A history of the appropriate sort is exemplified by the German tale of their common origins in the tribes who, under the leadership of Arminius, defeated the Romans in AD 9 at the Saltus Teutoburgiensis, thus ensuring for Germany a future less polyglot and cosmopolitan than that of the Roman provinces. Ironically, though, the story comes down to them through the Roman historian Tacitus. So too does the idea that the heroic virtues of the Germans stem from the fact that they are ‘a 84


genuinely pure and unique race’, not ‘tainted by inter-marriage with other peoples,’ and having, as a result ‘a remarkable similarity of bodily appearance’.22 Fichte’s construction of German national identity depends upon this Tacitean history, a history still so potent that when, in 1975, it was subjected to some academic criticism at the 100th anniversary of the unveiling of a monument to Arminius there was a storm of national protest.23 What makes racial mixing dangerous, according to this historicist view of national identity, is that it complicates the narrative that members of a nation can share.These complications – such as are also produced by unwelcome truths – threaten national loyalties supposedly grounded in the narrative. They also endanger the traditions which are based upon it and which provide the most powerful conservative argument against change.24 Conservative veneration for tradition – for the ways a people have of doing things which have been handed down with and through their history – imparts a predisposition in favour of existing political arrangements over new ones, and for the claims of long-standing groups over recent formations. The reason for this veneration is not only that the longevity of tradition attests to its social efficacy. It is the belief, derived from that other Anglo-Irishman and contemporary of Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, that the historical growth of nations, and the laying down of traditions which this involves, is analogous to that of a natural organism and thus not lightly to be tampered with. Organicism of this sort, in Anthony Quinton’s words, takes a society to be a unitary, natural growth, an organised living whole, not a mechanical aggregate . . . not composed of bare abstract individuals but of social beings, related to one another within a texture of inherited customs and institutions which endow them with their specific social natures.25 Organicism, then, is a third principle underlying conservative thought about the kinds of identity which are relevant to political arrangements. It throws up an answer slightly different from the racial or ethnic, and historicist ones just glanced at, though all three can readily be combined, namely in terms of membership of a cultural group thought of in the organically functionalist way described in Chapter 2. A group of this sort is apt for the statehood it may or may not already enjoy because it constitutes an organic unity which political additions or subtractions could only destabilise and admixtures upset. This sort of view merges into the cultural communitarian ones we shall examine 85


in detail later. It is enough to say now that the arguments against functionalism already looked at apply with some force to this conservative application of it, not least because, unlike its ethnographic counterparts, it is entirely a priori – an article of faith, not the finding of science.And that is a large part of the problem. For it is only as an article of faith that organicism can fuel contemporary ethnic nationalism, since the transforming facts of modernity which conservatives have unsuccessfully resisted tell a different story. Ethnic nationalists seek to change those facts by political action, and that is not conservatism but fascism. REFORMATION LIBERALISM

Conservatism, as we have seen, does not seek to justify political arrangements in terms of entitlements: it merely compares them with a picture of human society to see if they are workable. Those arrangements that have worked command respect, since they can be regarded as having arisen as a people’s natural response to their circumstances. On these principles, a system of absolute monarchy, say, may, for a particular society, be quite defensible, and the only rights allowable to its individual members may be those honoured by its specific customs and practices. Tenets such as these, grounded in religion rather than in the organicism of more modern conservatism, were what, in the seventeenth century, sparked off the prototype of a liberal reaction. The Reformation, with its plurality of denominations, brought to prominence a variety of opinions and ways of life that recalled the diversity of the classical pre-Christian world, and with it the Stoic perception of human unity among diversity. Now, however, it was not cosmopolitanism grounded in a common rational nature that answered the needs of those caught in a system of states each with its official religion. Two other related features of Stoicism26 were called into service, and both are antagonistic to conservatism. By then commonplace, they were neatly, if intemperately, digested in a verse by the seventeenth-century poet, Rochester: Then farewell sacred majesty, Let’s put all brutish tyrants down; When men are born and still live free, Here every head doth wear a crown.27 First, majesty is not sacred because it has no natural place in the order of things: government, and this is the first liberal principle, is artifical, a human contrivance for particular purposes which needs to 86


be justified as such. Second, ‘all men naturally were born free’,28 as John Milton put it in 1649, defending the execution of tyrants. Government, then, must be justified to individuals on the basis of their moral claims, and in particular their claims to freedom. These, I shall take it, are the two fundamental principles of liberalism, and common to all its forms. How, then, do group identities bear on the political arrangements that liberals would favour? The identities relevant to the seventeenth-century situation were religious ones, often generating a mingling of people of different religions within the same society, rather than a patchwork of separate and relatively self-sufficient groups. It was to this problematic that the species of liberalism we can call Reformation Liberalism was directed. But its political scope is wider than that of merely religious diversity. The solutions it applies to this can in principle be adapted to other kinds of cultural or ethnic identity, whether group identity in the strict sense is involved or not.What are they? Reformation Liberalism as I am understanding it is characterised by two features: freedom of political association and toleration. Freedom to associate with others under a common government may be held to follow from the idea that since we are born free we cannot justifiably be compelled by government unless we have given our actual consent to that government. Being free to give or withhold such consent implies a freedom of political association – a freedom necessary, perhaps, for individuals with the same religious persuasion to protect themselves against despotic persecution – a freedom exercised, for example, in the sixteenth century in the revolt of Protestant Holland against its Catholic Spanish overlords. According to this account the fact of membership of some distinctive sort of group, religious or whatever, does nothing to confer a right of separate statehood, or indeed of any kind of distinct organisation.What does so is the individual consent of members to a state, and it is as essentially free beings, not in virtue of some more specific identity, that they give their consent and earn the right to statehood. Or rather, they earn the right only by virtue of whatever specific identity they confer upon themselves, whether through voluntary political association or act of allegiance. This could be a national identity if the nation is conceived as an association of the appropriate sort or as a group with a suitable focus of common loyalty. It might appear from this that Reformation Liberalism could be used to defend states of a culturally homogeneous or even theocratic kind, if these are the sort that their members voluntarily sign up to. It 87


is indeed true that this account imposes no particular limitations on the shape of the state or the procedures it should follow. Its members will typically have much in common that has brought them together, whether by way of interests or cultural characteristics.They will naturally enough support forms of government and policies that protect and reinforce these common features so that the association continues to be one that they would wish to join.This may involve the adoption of arrangements specifically designed to serve certain cultural or territorial identities – by, for example, a federal or consociational system of government. Part of the point of such systems is to allow, in a state with a variety of identities, that certain of them be favoured in certain places or preserved against certain threats. And there is nothing in Reformation Liberalism that militates against this, though equally there is nothing positively to require it, except the threat of withdrawal of consent.29 Yet this is only half the story. A theocratic state could not emerge on Reformation Liberal principles because it would not be a tolerant one. It would not simply favour but enforce a particular way of life. Reformation Liberalism, however, demands that any state tolerate divergent beliefs and behaviour, so long as they do not infringe other people’s freedoms. The way such toleration is expressed in political arrangements is through a system of individual rights, or liberties as they are more accurately called. For the rights in question are the rights not to be interfered with in various ways – to enjoy what is known as negative liberty30 in respect of such things as religious practice, expression of opinion, domestic mores and the pursuit of one’s everyday activities. According these rights to all is what tolerating minority cultures, for example, comes down to, according to this liberal view. They are rights to do what one believes is right, or what one otherwise values, whatever other people’s beliefs and values are. The rights are fundamental and absolute ones and thus typically set down in the constitution of states. They thereby differ from the particular rights that may from time to time be granted to individuals as members of a culture specifically to protect their cultural identities, on matters, say, of education.31 There is no sharp line here. The liberties required for toleration are not clear-cut, as is demonstrated by court battles over just what some constitutional right allows: is freedom of religion, for example, compatible with a compulsory secular education?32 But this indeterminacy does not imply that the liberal state must be only a minimal state, legislating as little as possible so as to maximise the scope for individual freedom. Reformation Liberalism does not 88


require the state to maximise freedom in this way, for its members may consent to having it abridged and in this they exercise their freedom. But Reformation Liberalism does require that there be constitutional safeguards on how much freedom can be abridged, so as to protect those whose divergent opinions or behaviour would lead them to suffer from its abridgement by not permitting them to do what they believe they ought to do or, at worst, compelling them to do what they believe they ought not to do. One way of putting this is to say that Reformation Liberalism does not require the maximisation of freedom, but it must allow freedom for what it views as conscientious acts. Morally it is a deeply serious creed. That is why it can take cultural difference so seriously and lay down specific rights designed to respect it. These rights, of religious freedom for example, may allow cultural groups to impose internal restrictions33 on their members which are quite illiberal in the sense of not tolerating individual differences. They may seek to suppress the expression of heterodox opinions or certain sexual mores. Yet Reformation Liberals, true to their origins in a society of churches which did exactly that, will wish to tolerate such groups. How is this possible? Only because membership must itself be voluntary in the sense of permitting a right of exit.34 By placing themselves in the group members accept its restrictions and limit the scope for the deliverance of individual conscience, ill-advised as they may be as individuals so to do. But by the right of exit they can avail themselves of the freedoms which the state guarantees.The Reformation Liberal state does not seek to create the best conditions for the exercise of individual freedom. It seeks only that people should not be unwillingly constrained without necessity. The former, more ambitious task is not the aim of the state not least because not all cultural groups within it would accept that pursuing individual choices is always preferable to the following of authoritative pronouncements.Toleration, in these circumstances, can be defended as what is required for a modus vivendi between groups with different values. It is embodied in rights each must allow to members of other groups because they claim them for themselves and have freely chosen to live under the same polity. Without them, they could not conscientiously do so. The securing of personal liberties through a system of rights creates, in Reformation Liberalism, a distinction between the private sphere, in which liberties are exercised without the interference or involvement of the state, and the public arena, in which the business of the state is conducted. Since the private sphere is that in which liberty of 89


conscience is exercised, as paradigmatically in the practice of religion, so it is here that what is most valuable in the lives of individuals might be expected to flourish. The cultural identities that individuals hold dear are given free scope in the private sphere. Their institutionalised appearance in the public arena, if it happens at all, does so only the better to preserve the private space in which they can be celebrated and developed. It is for this reason that the Reformation Liberal can view with equanimity the development of a public culture around the state which mirrors the dominant culture or cultures in the language of political debate, civic architecture and, indeed, public mores generally. That this occludes minority cultures is of little importance so long as their practices can be fully enjoyed where all cultures principally are – in private. This view rests, however, on both an over-optimistic presumption of the resilience of private life, and an unreal division between private and public aspirations. Quite independently of any group loyalties, we want to express our cultural affiliations publicly, which is why, for instance, debate over standards of public architecture and its relation to tradition are so intense. Even if Reformation Liberalism protected the liberties of minorities, marginalising them publicly would scarcely seem to be fair.And indeed there is nothing in Reformation Liberalism which guarantees such fairness. Justice enters the picture only as freedom from tyranny, construed as the infringement of liberty, and equality only in its narrow aspect of political and legal equality for members of the political association. Ethnic discrimination, for example, could go unchecked so long as fundamental freedoms were not denied and legal equality was not prejudiced; and the economic disparities often evident between ethnic groups need attract no adverse attention. Whatever its merits, and they are many, Reformation Liberalism is a narrow political creed, at best inadequate to cope with socially divisive difference, at worst antagonistic to policies that are designed to do just that. ENLIGHTENMENT LIBERALISM

At the root of these deficiencies, it may be argued, is Reformation Liberalism’s failure to make clear why the freedom it protects is valuable. The general answer that freedom is to be protected so that people are not constrained to act contrary to their consciences is illuminating, it may be said, only if we have at least a tacit grasp of what is good about conscientious action. Furthermore, it may be continued, the toleration 90


which protects it will be possible only if others can be assumed to value such a freedom. Where some cultures place a different relative value on individual choice as against deference to authority, there must be some underlying value in freedom on which they can agree. It is in this spirit that thinkers in the eighteenth century Enlightenment, in particular Kant, devised a form of liberalism which we can call Enlightenment Liberalism, predicated upon a particular understanding of what freedom is, an understanding presumed to command universal acceptance. It is that freedom is autonomy.The most celebrated recent exponent of this sort of liberalism is the earlier John Rawls, who grounds his theory in a Kantian conception of autonomy expressed as follows: a person is acting autonomously when the principles of his action are chosen by him as the most adequate possible expression of his nature as a free and equal rational being. The principles he acts on are not adopted because of his social position or natural endowments, or in view of the particular kind of society in which he lives or the specific things that he happens to want.To act on such principles is to act heteronomously.35 Enlightenment Liberalism commends the political arrangements that such an autonomous subject would choose and that would enhance her autonomy, maximising her freedom to live out a life of her own choosing – a life that is valuable precisely because it is the one that she chooses to live, not some heteronomous substitute. Enlightenment Liberalism then, does have an account of the value of conscientious action, and one that demands a greater scope for it than is allowed for by Reformation Liberalism. The job of the state according to the Enlightenment account is to create conditions in which individual members can decide what is best for themselves on the basis of the most clear-sighted and unblinkered consideration of reasons, rather than simply tolerating what each decides for whatever reason and, most probably, on the basis of what their religion or cultural group expects of them.This has two important consequences for the sort of state this must be. First it must be a neutral state.That is to say, the state must be neutral in regard to the different conceptions of a good life that its members may entertain. Its arrangements and policies must not favour any one over others, for to do so would limit the freedom of those whose conception was not favoured. Rather it must adopt procedures which guarantee such equal treatment and impartiality. It must adopt procedures which ensure justice for its 91


members, so that none of them are deprived of the opportunities to live a good life by their own standards that others have access to. This first requirement of neutrality generates, via its demand for justice, another, namely that the opportunities and resources for leading a good life be made accessible to all on an equitable basis. It is the business of the state to ensure such a fair distribution.What precisely the principles of distribution are do not concern us here. It is enough to say that they are supposedly such that any rational being will assent to them. It is because they should command such assent that a state which operates in accordance with them is legitimate.The state’s artificial existence is compatible with its members freedom not because they actually have consented to it, but because they would consent to it, if they were being reasonable, as the state that maximises their scope for individual freedom. Unlike the Reformation Liberal state, then, the Enlightenment state that conforms to principles of justice is not in any ordinary sense a voluntary association. Indeed, it is quite unclear on what basis the borders of such a state might be drawn. As critics of Rawls have noted,36 he simply assumes the existence of such borders. Perhaps Kant was right to infer cosmopolitanism from these rationalistic foundations and thus the irrelevance of group identities to the state’s political arrangements. It would, however, be premature to leap to this conclusion. Could the basis of statehood reside, perhaps, in a shared national identity? Building on Enlightenment Liberal thinking, a case for this might be made. To start with, the Enlightenment state is not to be thought of as based on a mere modus vivendi:37 it is a political community founded on a common consensus about the principles of justice which legitimate it. Social unity and stability, it is suggested, requires more than a mere willingness to put up with one’s fellows. It requires a principled agreement on the arrangements under which individuals are to be governed. This could be achieved in a theocratic state, say, but in an illiberal way. In a state with a plurality of faiths and other competing cultural conceptions of the good life there must be agreement on what would be a fair way of giving all an opportunity for living it. Such an agreement could provide the basis of national identity under a certain conception – and a particularly American one at that, reminiscent of Abraham Lincoln’s remark that what picks out the Americans is that they are ‘dedicated to a proposition’.38 But such dedication is, unlike the religious professions of members of a theocratic state, not something that could make them a nation prior to 92


membership of the state. Others may share it apart from Americans: but American nationality requires state membership. Shared national identity so conceived is not, therefore, something which can determine people’s statehood, unlike an association into which they may enter. Yet it could be argued that whether some set of political arrangements are appropriate for people depends on whether they share a consensual identity. What would hold Enlightenment Liberals back from this conclusion is, however, their insistence that there is just one way recommendable to reason for making such arrangements, so that failure to accept them implies not that the arrangements need to change, but that those governed under them should do so. It is this universalising aspect of Enlightenment Liberalism that Rawls himself eventually abandoned, accepting that not all cultures would grant the cardinal importance of autonomy which it posits, and limiting the application of the political theory based on it to the modern European societies from whose culture it derives and those influenced by them. Rawls calls his theory of the state, as so modified, ‘political liberalism’, because it views the freedom which it fosters as a merely political, rather than a comprehensively moral value. This approach ties political arrangements to culture, or at least to public culture – to the culture in which public reasoning about politics takes place and which thereby generates a conception of justice which is ‘as far as possible, independent of the opposing and conflicting philosophical and religious doctrines that citizens affirm’.39 There seems considerable scope in political liberalism for justifying political arrangements by reference to a national identity, understood in terms of such a shared public culture along the lines of the previous paragraph. But the reason that this is possible is precisely that the abstract rational subject of the Enlightenment has been discarded as that which characterises people’s primary identities. Returning to Enlightenment Liberalism, however, we may enquire what its general implications are for group identities. At first sight it may seem that it compels us to be blind in politics to differences of identity. It is after all as ‘free and equal rational beings’ that the state must treat its members, or risk not maximising their freedoms fairly. This may seem to require strict policies of non-discrimination, in which racial, ethnic, cultural or national identities are ignored in the arrangements that are made for governance, each person entering the polity not under such an identity but simply as a member of the state.40 93


Yet this might be denied on the grounds that the provision of opportunities and resources for individual self-development requires recognition of group membership and the provision of rights which safeguard it.Will Kymlicka has adopted such an approach ‘to show that the same arguments . . . for equal rights and resources within a nationstate can be used to defend special status for minority cultures in a culturally plural state’.41 Kymlicka believes that membership of a cultural group has an instrumental role in permitting individuals to develop their life plans freely. His particular account of this is, as we saw in an earlier chapter, that such membership is what makes possible the exercising of choice. But this view may be dispensable, if some other account of the value of cultural membership can be given, as no doubt it can. Kymlicka observes that minority groups often face disadvantages that others do not and therefore that the provision of minority rights to overcome them is sometimes justified. These may be rights to determine residence, language use and so on within a part of the state, procedures for group representation or, at the limit, arrangements for secession. This version of Enlightenment Liberalism suggests a different treatment of minority groups from that of Reformation Liberalism. On the one hand the former may require, as we have just seen, the provision of cultural rights in the interests of justice, while the latter authorises them only as needed for a stable association.Yet the latter permits such groups to adopt intolerant practices just so long as they allow a right of exit to members. Enlightenment Liberalism, by contrast, is reluctant to concede that cultural groups should have such powers, precisely because it discountenances the heteronomy to which exercising such powers gives rise. According to such a view, the rights of religious groups to withdraw their children from secular education are denied in order to protect the children’s autonomy. Enlightenment Liberalists like Kymlicka may find special reasons to allow such a right, whether as exceptionally necessary for cultural protection or as hallowed by tradition and not now withdrawable without unacceptable cultural disruption.42 But the whole tenor of their theory runs against it. Equal opportunities for individual self-development are crucial to the Enlightenment programme for the liberal state, and these militate against, in general, the fostering of illiberal groups.Yet some groups do value group solidarity higher than individual choice. It is hard to escape the conclusion that they are being discriminated against in the Enlightenment state. Enlightenment Liberalism does nothing to recognise such profound moral diversity. 94


ROMANTIC LIBERALISM

Enlightenment Liberalism provides the ideology for the modern welfare state that seeks equality of opportunity, provides safety nets for disadvantaged groups and adopts a permissive pattern of social legislation. It is essentially progressive, as a result of its optimism that the exercise of human freedom, diverse as it may be, will bring about improvements which conformity to custom and tradition – heteronomy, in a word – can only impede. Long-lived as the Enlightenment vision has been, however, it was already threatened by the Romantic Movement at the end of the eighteenth century, which, in the next, gave rise to its own species of Romantic Liberalism as we can call it.43 Romantic Liberalism continues to give pride of place to freedom, construed in terms of individual autonomy, as the supreme value. But it views autonomy as achievable only within the ambit of a distinct cultural group – in particular, the nation. It is the role of the state to promote the good of such a cultural group, and a state is legitimate if and only if it has arrangements enabling it to do so.The model of this relation is the nation-state, for the nation-state can pursue the good of the nation because it is an expression of national autonomy. Individual autonomy is realisable, according to this Romantic Liberal conception, only if the individual’s cultural group is itself autonomous – able to choose for itself what is good for the group and to act in order to achieve it. A state must be justified to individual members as that wherein their freely chosen lives can flourish; but it will be justified as such only because they already acknowledge a certain cultural identity. While grounding its political theory in individual autonomy, then, Romantic diverges from Enlightenment Liberalism in rejecting the idea of a universal rational nature which the latter had imported along with it to supply the explanatory lacuna in the Reformation idea of freedom. Instead Romantic Liberalism posits human identities as, in John Gray’s words, ‘always local affairs, precipitates of particular forms of common life, never tokens of the universal type of generic humanity’.44 The existence of such group identities need not lead to heteronomy, for there are still conscientious choices to be made between alternatives, even if what alternatives are available depend upon one’s background culture. Nor are such identities necessarily unrevisable: exposure to other cultures can lead to change. And while cultural identities are fundamentally given – ‘by inheritance and by recognition’45 – one’s culture provides a focus of allegiance, and, in this way, adherence to it takes on an at least partly voluntary character. 95


The relevant cultural identities cannot be relegated to a private realm, for the individual must, as Raz says, be able ‘to express in public and develop without repression those aspects of his personality which are bound up with his sense of identity as a member of his community.’46 If he cannot, then he does not have full scope for the exercise of individual autonomy. The Romantic Liberal state is obviously, therefore, not a neutral state like the Enlightenment one. Its task is to support the forms of life that its constituent cultures value and to supply the goods that are required for them. Some thinkers in this tradition, like Joseph Raz, have claimed that ‘it is the function of governments to promote morality. . . that governments should promote the quality of life of those whose lives and actions they can affect,’ and that this does not require them ‘to protect worthless let alone bad options’.47 It is actually worthwhile lives they must support, not those believed to be valuable, and this is supposedly not an infringement of autonomy because that requires only a choice between good options. While the argument may be questioned, the overall point seems to be that it is not just any kinds of life that the state should support, but those grounded in cultures which confer value on life.This may well involve impermissive policies towards some lifestyles. But there will presumably be a defence against having such policies applied when these are the lifestyles of members of some constituent culture. Romantic Liberals are likely to be nationalists, in the sense of identifying the nation as the relevant kind of cultural group to have a right to statehood, so that the policies a state pursues will, in ideal circumstances, be those that promote the good of the nation so conceived. Some, however, like Yael Tamir, acknowledge that ‘the era of homogeneous and viable nation-states is over,’48 if there ever was such an era, and that the political arrangements of the state must therefore make it possible to support a number of nations. Others, like Raz, believe that, in any case, the state cannot support a single conception of the good, but must foster a plurality of cultural options. Indeed, this is claimed to be required for the proper exercise of choice involved in autonomous activity.Whether this is so or not, it would be inconsistent of Romantic Liberals to deny to cultural minorities the opportunities they seek for cultural groups in general, since to do so would unfairly deny some the chance to live their lives autonomously. But to do so may not be easy. Raz, like many other Romantic Liberals, is a pluralist.That is to say, he believes ‘the plurality of valuable activities and ways of life to be ultimate and ineliminable’, each ‘being good 96


and not susceptible to comparison of degree’. Choices have to be made and they will bring the claims of incommensurable cultures into conflict, for, Raz believes, ‘conflict is endemic to multiculturalism . . . it is, in fact endemic to value pluralism in all its forms’.49 This view, deriving immediately from Isaiah Berlin and through him from Romantic theorists like Herder, supports liberal policies of toleration, but, put together with the non-neutrality of the state, these policies cannot be expected to produce permanent and stable solutions to the problems of inter-group relations. Yet Romantic Liberalism’s pluralism scarcely seems to go far enough. By locating cultural identity in group membership it fails to recognise the cultural diversity which lies within the subject, at least under modern conditions – a diversity ironically recognised in the classical world’s disinclination to recognise group identities for political purposes and to despise such practices as fit only for barbarian tribes. But if we cast off this Herderian assumption of group cultures, it is hard to see how a Romantic Liberal politics would work – what making space for all the multitudinous cultural identities there really are will come to, or even how to decide which were at all relevant to political arrangements and which were not.The difficulty turns on the idea of autonomy itself, even when this is set, more realistically than in the Enlightenment, against a backgound of the really discernible options a culture can provide. It is quite unclear that autonomy can bear the political weight placed on it by liberal philosophers since the Enlightenment, as that whose maintenance and enhancement justifies to the governed the political arrangements for governing them. For suppose autonomy is thought of, as Stanley Benn suggests,50 in terms of an individual’s capacity to subject her evaluative beliefs to criticism from within her culture, and that this in turn requires that her culture be pluralistic, it is still quite unclear what politics can contribute to fostering it. Unless, perhaps, it can do so simply by opposing the creation of monolithic culture-based regimes. But this policy might seem to attract the criticism that if this is the sort of regime people want then it would be illiberal to put obstacles in the way of it, since people would thereby be prevented from doing what they choose to do on the grounds that their present choice restricts their later options. Indeed, this is the criticism often made of western interventions in the affairs of countries without a tradition of valuing autonomy. Benn remarks that such cultures ‘would simply lack the incoherences which leave space for autonomous development’ and that therefore ‘autonomy is an ideal for troubled times’, the sort of times with their 97


‘influx of strange and challenging ideas’51 that gave rise to Stoicism in the classical world. No doubt we live in such times and the attempt to resist them through monolithic cultures is a regressive reaction. But it is unclear that the Enlightenment valorisation of autonomy can offer a coherent response to such cultures. Reformation Liberalism’s simpler notion of freedoms that can be infringed in concrete ways by despotic states and which can be safeguarded in legitimate ones does not attract such strictures. And if it is asked what is wrong with such infringements perhaps we should point to particular examples of oppression and misery, rather than gloss them, in the style of many contemporary Anglo-American philosophers, as violations of some universal good. Whether any form of liberalism can deal with the political problems arising from ethnic and cultural diversity is something we can assess only by seeing what solutions its various varieties offer in specific situations where questions of state membership, state cohesion and state boundaries arise.We shall examine these in the three chapters comprising the third part of this volume. Here we shall proceed to some different theoretical approaches to justifying political arrangements. NOTES 1. A. Birley, Life in Roman Britain (London: Batsford, 1981), p. 153. 2. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, tr. G. Long [1862], VI. 44. ‘Antoninus’ was the name Marcus Aurelius took from his imperial predecessor and adoptive parent, Antoninus Pius. 3. Ibid.VI. 54. 4. Ibid.VII. 9. 5. Ibid.VII. 13. 6. Cp. M. Nussbaum, ‘Kant and cosmopolitanism’, in J. Bohman and M. Lutz-Bachmann (eds), Perpetual Peace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 33. 7. See her ‘Patriotism and cosmopolitanism’ in J. Cohen (ed.), For Love of Country (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). 8. Quoted in H. Reiss (ed.), Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: CUP, 1970), p. 114. 9. J. Butler, ‘Universality in culture’ in Cohen, For Love of Country, p. 52. 10. E. A.Walker, The British Empire (Oxford: OUP, 1943), p. 4. 11. As Andrew Linklater does in The Transformation of Political Community (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), ch. 6. 12. Cp. N. Dower, World Ethics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998), ch. 5. 13. See particularly his Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge: Polity, 1990). For a discussion in relation to cosmopolitanism see Linklater, Transformation of Political Community, ch. 3. For criticism see

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14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

M. Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), ch. 6. C. Beitz, ‘Cosmopolitan ideals and national sentiment’, Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983), pp. 591–600. O. Goldsmith, ‘National prejudices’, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary [1741–52] (many editions). I use this notion in its International Relations sense: see for example C. Brown, Understanding International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 26–35. A. Quinton, ‘Conservatism’ in R. E. Goodin and P. Pettit (eds), A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 259. Quoted in M. and A. Dummett, ‘The role of government in Britain’s racial crisis’, in C. Husband (ed.), ‘Race’ in Britain: Continuity and Change (London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. 137. R. Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), p. 68. R. Scruton, ‘In defence of the nation’, in The Philosopher on Dover Beach (Manchester: Carcanet, 1990), p. 305. D. Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: OUP, 1995), p. 23. Quoted in C. J. Christie, Race and Nation (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), p. 23. For the influence of Tacitus see M. Thom, Republics, Nations and Tribes (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 259–60. See H. Schulze, States, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 95. Though this point is curiously unmentioned in Quinton,‘Conservatism’, which concentrates on arguments from the disruptive and unpredictable results of change. A. Quinton, The Politics of Imperfection (London: Faber, 1978), p. 2. Both derive from Chrysippus and the earlier Greek Stoics rather than from later Roman ones like Marcus Aurelius, who suppressed Christianity as a danger to the state. See G. H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory (London: Harrap, 1963), chs 8–9. Quoted in C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 413. Quoted in A. N.Wilson, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: OUP, 1983), p. 162. Chandran Kukathas, who is in many respects what I am calling a Reformation Liberal, argues that the role of the state is solely the preservation of peace and order, so that the intentional promotion of cultural objectives is illegitimate, and the state should be, in this sense, neutral; though this is not to say that it must aim at cultural even-handedness. See his ‘Liberalism and multiculturalism’, Political Theory 26 (1998), pp. 686–99. See I. Berlin,‘Two concepts of liberty’ in D. Miller (ed.), Liberty (Oxford: OUP, 1991), pp. 34–43. Cp. C.Taylor, Multiculturalism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994), p. 59. For an interesting discussion of the Amish case that it is not, see Jeff

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33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

Spinner, The Boundaries of Citizenship (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1994), ch. 5. As Kymlicka calls them, The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: OUP, 1995), p. 14. See C. Kukathas, ‘Are there any cultural rights?’, in Kymlicka, The Rights of Minority Cultures, pp. 245–50. J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: OUP, 1973), p. 252. For example, Michael Sandel, ‘The procedural republic and the unencumbered self ’, in S.Avineri and A. de-Shalit (eds), Communitarianism and Individualism (Oxford: OUP, 1992), pp. 20–4. As Rawls insists in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia UP, 1996), pp. 144–50. Quoted in B. Russell, ‘British and American nationalism’, in A. F. Scott (ed.), Topics and Opinions (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 14. Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 9. For a discussion see Taylor, Multiculturalism. W. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: OUP, 1989), p. 162. See W. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: OUP, 1995), ch. 8. The reader should be warned that, while ‘Reformation’ and ‘Enlightenment Liberalism’ are fairly standard labels, ‘Romantic Liberalism’ is the author’s own coinage. J. Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 79. Ibid. p. 124. J. Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: OUP, 1986), p. 207. Ibid. pp. 415 and 411. Y. Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993), p. 3. J. Raz, ‘Multiculturalism: A liberal perspective’, in his Ethics in the Public Domain (Oxford: OUP, 1994), p. 164. S. Benn, A Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: CUP, 1988), pp. 178–81. Ibid. pp. 182–3.

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5 COMMUNITARIANISM

qw

COMMUNITY

As we have seen, liberalism seeks to justify political arrangements on the basis of the moral claims of individuals, and, in particular, their claims to exercise personal freedom. By contrast communitarians, as we shall understand the term, require political arrangements to be justified on the basis of the moral claims of communities.We need to ask, then, what the relevant communities are and what moral claims might be made for them pertinent to the justification of political arrangements. Neither question can be answered easily or uncontroversially, but it may be thought, once answered, that communitarianism should provide a more promising account of the relevance of ethnic or national identity to political arrangements than liberalism. For such identities derive from membership of groups which do or can constitute communities, so that the claims of these communities may be used to justify the recognition of these identities in political arrangements. To tackle the question of what kind of community has a moral claim that can justify political recognition we need to look back well beyond the period in which liberalism originated.We need to look back to the world of ancient Greece in which cosmopolitanism developed precisely as the antithesis of the view that membership of particular communities was relevant to political justification. Aristotle’s account of the Greek city-state or polis provides the locus classicus for this view. ‘Every polis’ he wrote in the opening sentence of his Politics, ‘is some 101


kind of community and every community is established for some good.’1 Indeed the polis is the over-arching community which aims at the common good, embracing the goods of its constituent communities, like households and villages. Throughout the book Aristotle assesses arrangements for the polis in terms of whether they conduce to that good, which is the achievement of the good life for its members. But the good life is possible for them only as members, so that they do not aim at it independently of aiming at the common good. This is because human beings are by nature members of some polis and as such share a common concern for what is good in it, just as in a household. There are a number of themes here which we can tease out and develop, some of them common to and constitutive of all forms of communitarianism, others specific to the form of communitarianism of which Aristotle was the founder. One is that a community is constituted by its members’ pursuit of common goals.This is not just to say that each member happens to have the same goals, but that they are goals such that each member recognises their achievement as good whoever happens to be responsible for it. Their achievement, that is to say, contributes to the common good of the community. We can call this the common good thesis: communities are constituted by their having a specific common good. Next, and consequentially, each community must possess a substantive conception of the good, at least so far as its common goals are concerned. It must have a conception of what a good life for its members consists in. For unless its members share such a conception they will be unable to recognise the achievement of their goals. This shared conception thesis does not, of course, imply that each community must possess a different and distinctive conception of the good or even that each one’s is uncontested – only that there is enough agreement on the common good for each community to pursue. Thirdly, there is the embedded individual thesis, which states that the identity of individual members of a community is given by their place in it, and is not completely intelligible independently of this. The force of the thesis is twofold. On the one hand it denies that a community can be regarded as consisting of an aggregation of atomic individuals each with their own history and projects to which membership of the community happens to contribute. Rather, what it is to be such an individual and to be a member of a community are interdependent. On the other hand the thesis denies that the goals of individuals can be conceived quite independently of the values they 102

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have through occupying their places in the community. These are values they necessarily have from sharing its substantive conception of the good. But this explains why they cannot be viewed as atomic individuals, for the goals which shape their history and projects derive from their community membership and thus cannot explain it. Both these aspects of the embedded individual thesis can be discerned in Aristotle’s own particular gloss on this communitarian metaphysics. His claim that human beings are by nature members of communities denies that they can be thought of as in their essences atomic individuals who come together in the voluntary association conceived by liberalism, for goals specifiable independently of the existence of a community. Indeed, in a strikingly modern ecological vein, Aristotle refers to men as parts of their community.2 And it is with this image in mind that we can understand Aristotle’s claim that when members of the community come together collectively they can be better than they are as individuals, since, contributing each one’s ‘share of virtue and practical wisdom . . . they become in a manner one man . . . with regard to their character and thought’.3 Here their pursuit of the common good attests to virtuous ends which as individuals pursuing selfish goals they may not seem to possess.What they are, and thus the goals they have, virtuously pursued or not, are determined by the kinds of contribution to the common good they make, which Aristotle compares to the different functions of sailors on a ship.4 The identities of members of the community depend on their places in it, just as the identities of sailors as helmsman, lookout and so forth depend on their roles in the ship. But as Aristotle acknowledges, the constitutions of communities differ, so that the parts to be played in them will differ too, and the values realised in the performance of them. Here is foreshadowed an important communitarian theme deriving from the embedded individual thesis, namely that human identities derive not from modifications to a common core but from variations in the diverse shapes that membership of different communities provides. We come now to the other types of communitarian thesis, namely the ethical and political ones. Two ethical theses may be stated: the first, the value of membership thesis, as it might be dubbed, characterises this value as an intrinsic good, and thus one not reducible to its instrumental value in securing the purposes of individuals.This is the ethical correlate of the embedded individual thesis which views community membership not as associating for independently identifiable individual ends, but as occupying identity-constituting roles.The 103


value of membership thesis goes beyond the metaphysical theses, however, in declaring a value to community membership so conceived. A second thesis which follows from it is that the community has ethical claims upon its members, so that they have obligations to secure its common good arising from the value that it brings them. This claim of community thesis draws out the ethical demands that membership imposes.Two political theses are embraced by communitarians to spell out the proper relations between the state and the community as characterised by the metaphysical and ethical theses. One, the prioritisation thesis, specifies that the role of the state is to give priority to securing the common good in its arrangements and policies. This connects directly, of course, to the requirement of communitarianism with which we started this chapter, namely that political arrangements be justified by the moral claims of the community. The second political thesis follows hard on the heels of the first; it is a non-neutrality thesis to the effect that the state’s task is to make policy in accordance with the community’s substantive conception of the good which is, after all, what determines that its common goals constitute a good. The state cannot be neutral, as under some forms of liberalism, in regard to different conceptions of the good that individuals within it may espouse. These theses constitute, I suggest, a coherent communitarian picture of the individual, the community and the state.5 But how, we may ask, does this picture relate to the problems of ethnicity and national identity which concern us here? Well, so far we have a very abstract outline of the communitarian position. Until we colour it in to arrive at a characterisation of more specific forms of communitarianism there is little that we can deduce about its implications for our current concerns. Two things may, however, strike us. One is that if people are to be identified in terms of their community membership, then non-relational characteristics, like race, will in themselves be irrelevant to their identities and hence to the political arrangements which apply to them. But this encouraging conclusion fades when we notice how Aristotle, for example, uses the requirement that members of the polis must deliberate in accordance with its values to exclude slaves and women from full membership, on the grounds either that they lack the deliberative faculty or that they do not act on it.6 This is a bad portent for a communitarian politics of difference.What may mitigate it a little is Aristotle’s insistence that ‘a city is not made up only of so many men, but of different kinds of men; for similars do not constitute a city’.7 They do not do so, because difference is needed for there to be the 104

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recognition of something as a common goal among individual ends and thus for there to be different contributions towards it. The other point which may strike us is that, according to the communitarian view, a person without any connection with some community lacks a meaningful life. Aristotle likens her position, if she has brought it upon herself rather than simply been unlucky, to that of ‘an isolated piece in a game of draughts’8 – useless in the play that proceeds around her.This is troubling with respect to the situation of immigrants or others who may seem to stand apart from the settled life of the community. And it is perhaps ironic that Aristotle should have invited these apprehensions about his account. Born in Stagira, he was himself a ‘metic’ or resident alien in both Athens and Macedonia, the states in which he spent most of his life. REPUBLICANISM

Aristotle develops his own account of community in a quite specific and distinctive way, including features which I have aimed to suppress in my general characterisation of communitarianism. Most notable among these is the fact that Aristotle’s community is a political community, the polis or city-state of ancient Greece. The state is not an organisation to regulate a community which is essentially independent of it: it is just one aspect of the community and indispensable to the members constituting this social formation. It is this conception of community which was taken up by Roman thinkers like Cicero and which, through their influence, gave rise in the medieval and modern period to the form of communitarianism we can recognise in republicanism.9 We can, perhaps, identify its leading features by looking at Cicero’s account in De Republica. Cicero defines a people, thought of as forming a political community, as ‘an association united by a common sense of right and a community of interest’.10 They are a group collected together by the fact of common residence in a city (or more generally a territory) and by having shared interests in getting along together to make the best use of the resources which their similar situation brings. This is, perhaps, the first point to notice. The people’s common good consists in the fulfilment of shared interests; and that there are these shared interests is something we can see from the mere fact of their situation. The question that arises, then, is: what makes a group that finds itself in this position a community? What is it, that is to say, which brings it about that the group is aiming at a common good? 105


Cicero is clear on this point. He compares the community to a similarly situated group living under the rule of a tyrant, a faction or even an oppressive majority. What is lacking in these cases is a ‘bond of justice’.11 Without it there is nothing to fashion people who do have coincident interests to pursue into a single body fitted to promote them in such a way that they can be viewed as a common interest. Such people lack an effective ‘common sense of right’ – an agreed system of law and administration whereby the pursuit of their individual interests can be regulated in a way that contributes to the common interest rather than to sectional ones. And this is the second point to notice: in a community, it is the fact that shared interests are pursued in accordance with the community’s system of justice that enables its common good to be promoted. So pursued its shared interests can be recognised as contributing to the common good, or, to put the same point differently, something counts as a system of justice if it enables its shared interests to be recognised as so contributing. It is clearly an element of Cicero’s thinking, as of Aristotle’s, and a third important feature of republicanism, that the formulation of laws that co-ordinate individual behaviour in a way that conduces to the common good is a matter for deliberation between members of the community. What constitutes the common good is not simply given: it is a matter for political debate and decision-making. By relating it to the communitarian theses listed in the preceding section, we can now bring out more vividly what a republican communitarianism is like.The common good conceived of in terms of the serving of mutual interests is mediated by a shared conception of the good life made possible through justice. Cicero thinks of the good society as pre-eminently a just society, so that insofar as the common good is not secured that is due to injustices.The community’s substantive conception of the good expresses itself in its members’ ‘common sense of right’. Law and administration are not, therefore, to be thought of as providing a neutral framework for individual projects. They must be conceived as putting into effect a vision of the good life, which is inescapably a social life. In doing so they enforce the ethical claims that membership of the community makes upon its members, members whose essences are social, embedded as they are, in the life of the community. Cicero himself maintained a Stoic conception of justice as recognisable by reason and thus giving rise to laws ‘of universal application, unchanging and everlasting’.12 In consequence he sought to discover the best political arrangements for any state. Such an approach characterises 106

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a good deal of later republicanism too, sharing, as it does, the universalising ambitions we have previously noted in cosmopolitanism. But it is a detachable feature, and a republican view of the good society as a just society permits a more particularistic reading, sympathetic to a communitarian emphasis on the specificity of each community’s common good and the distinctiveness of the social lives which this can produce. Republicanism can allow, as we noticed from Aristotle’s account, that different ‘constitutions’, arising from varying circumstances, can give rise to such diversity in social identities.And it can do this without abandoning the fundamental republican notion that a group constitutes a community on account of some objectively assessable structural features, namely the pursuit of shared interests through an agreed system of justice. For it is such features which will enable us, who are not members of the community and do not share its conception of the good, to recognise the group as a community, with the value that this brings its members, rather than some other kind of society. On the one hand, we do not necessarily need to agree with its system of justice to recognise that it is such a system: a way of coordinating individual interests that seems fair to them. On the other hand, we do not need to place the particular value which they do on the fulfilment of their shared interests to grasp that it is interests that are shared: the mere fact of their common occupancy of a territory is enough to establish that interests must be so viewed if conflict is to be avoided, and this sets in train the search for a shared conception of what their fulfilment might amount to. Presenting the matter in this way brings out that for republicans the building and maintenance of a community is a task, a task imposed by circumstances. The shared conception of the good required is not something given, as those circumstances are. It is something arrived at through the social and political interactions involved in facing these circumstances. This is the importance of the third feature of republicanism I highlighted earlier: the need for political deliberation in identifying the common good of the community. The form of such deliberation is given its classic exposition by a much later republican thinker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the apostle of French republican nationalism. In political deliberation the judgement we must make is, ‘this is of advantage to the state’, not, ‘it is of advantage to this or that individual that such and such a proposition becomes law’, however many individuals we concern ourselves with. For ‘there is often a considerable difference between the will of all and the general will. The latter is concerned only with the common interest, the former 107


with interests that are partial, being itself but the sum of individual wills’.13 The general will arrived at through properly conducted political deliberation aims at the common good of the community because it abstracts from the particular and private interests of its members and takes account only of what concerns them qua members.The common good is not seen as the aggregation of individual interests picked out independently of their being the interests of members, as under liberalism they are. Rather it is what serves the interests anyone would have simply through being placed in the circumstances in which the members of the community collectively find themselves. It is through expressing the general will so conceived that the common good is prioritised, and it is prioritised by embedded individuals whose community membership is essential to their being able to share an interest in its fulfilment. The notion of political action to secure the common good, rather than individual interests, presupposes a distinction between the public and the private realms which is crucial to republicanism. It is as a member of the political community, as a citizen for short, that one aims at that community’s common good. One’s other attachments – religious, cultural or whatever – are supposedly left behind in republican politics. This is not to say that they have to be abandoned. Far from it; they are precisely what make up the private sphere in which one acts, not as a citizen, but as a member of all those groupings whose common interests can have no political expression, for, were they to do so, the state would become a battleground between conflicting interests rather than a workshop for the fulfilment of common ones. It is in just this spirit that, during the French Revolution, Clermont-Tonnerre famously enunciated the principle, as applied to the Jews who had previously had their own political corporations, that ‘one must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation, and give everything to the Jews as individuals’.14 Nationality as a political identity is possible under republicanism only insofar as it is the nationality of republican citizenship. But all merely cultural appurtenances associated with supposedly national minorities in the republic are allowable as the purely private affair of the individual citizens involved with them. The boundary between the public and the private realm is not fixed prior to the outcomes of republican deliberation. It is fixed by them. For since it is they that determine what is to count as the common good, they also fix the boundaries which determine the scope of public and of private action respectively. This may itself seem worrying if there is no principled way of allowing for the freedom that 108

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individuals need to pursue their private purposes. Indeed, liberty, one of the watchwords of the republic, is determined in its application to any particular state by the deliberations of its members. For this is not liberty in the sense of freedom from interference, as in the liberal state which ensures such freedom in the private sphere, but liberty in the sense of effective participation in a self-governing state.15 While France is, of course, the natural home of this kind of republican thought, there are elements of it in America despite the latter’s predominantly liberal character.This Jeffersonian strain breaks from time to time above the Madisonian surface where diversity is celebrated as a guarantee of freedom against majorities.16 ASSIMILATION

I have sketched out the leading ideas of republican communitarianism and hinted at the way in which it bears upon the problems posed by ethnic and national identities.The biggest of these problems concerns the position of ethnic minorities under republicanism. But before we discuss it two other issues should be briefly addressed. The first concerns race. We noticed that Aristotle defended the institution of slavery in the polis on the grounds of the unfitness of those who were slaves to full citizenship, though he did not ground this in their racial characteristics. Later republicans have been less reluctant to do so. In America, as Dr Johnson dryly observed,‘we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes’17 and a republican constitution committed to freedom left blacks in chains. Nor, of course, is racism absent from contemporary republics like France. On the one hand this seems aberrant and paradoxical: how can racism go hand in hand with the enunciation of principles of liberty, equality and fraternity? On the other hand, however, racism can seem to be an inevitable product of the republican project itself, a project in which a certain type of political society – the republic – is valorised and certain kinds of relationship are prescribed for it. These are relationships in which, ideally and in the sense we shall investigate more fully in a moment, everyone is assimilated to the same status as a citizen. But this means that there is, in the words of Etienne Balibar,‘a consequent need to differentiate and rank individuals or groups in terms of their greater or lesser aptitudes for – or resistance to – assimilation’.18 And this is expressed in the kind of social categorisation which, as we have seen, is characteristic of racism. It is, however, indefensible on purely republican principles, where the qualification for membership derives from performance of a 109


role that contributes to the life of the community. It is this qualification, and not some supposedly higher level capacity to appreciate republican values, that is required of members, and failure to acknowledge it is a failure of the fraternity that consists precisely in an affective recognition of a common situation and a common task. Before returning, though, to discuss the sort of assimilation that republicanism requires, a second issue should be briefly set aside. It is the question of whether republican citizenship can be regarded as a form of national identity. Certainly republicanism is often contrasted with nationalism, but, I suggest, on the basis of an over-limited conception of nationalism and of the sorts of identity in which different nationalisms can locate national identity. Indeed, there are at least two more general forms of national identity of which membership of the republic can be viewed as a species. One is territorial nationality. The republic is essentially a stretch of territory in which people find themselves thrown together with consequential shared interests.Their common involvement with and dependence on that territory is what gives them a shared identity. They are, for example, French people because they are born in the land of France or admitted to citizenship through residence. But they are also French people through sharing a second form of national identity, one that results from France being a republic, namely a certain form of cultural nationality. For while what brings them together in the first place is not shared values, the republic in which they are brought together involves, as I have tried to show, the development and pursuit of shared values which become the property of its citizens. We can come now to consider the ways in which the republican nation can cope with those within its borders who espouse distinctive ethnic identities, and the question with which we are immediately concerned is ‘what is expected of members of the republic by way of assimilation? What kind of adaptation is involved in this and how does it bear on pre-existing identities?’ Let us look then at a test case, the so-called ‘affaire du foularde islamique’ – precipitated in 1989 when three daughters of immigrants went to school in France wearing the Muslim headscarf.19 This was taken by teachers to be an attack upon the republican ethos of the state’s schools, whose secularism expresses the common education for public life provided for future citizens, blind to the religious or other cultural differences which must remain within the private sphere. In fact the State Council found that such symbols of religious affiliation as the headscarves were not incompatible with the secularism of the schools so long as they did not involve 110

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proselytisation, but in 1994 the Minister of Education acted to ban the wearing of them.The affair sparked a vigorous debate among French intellectuals as to whether republicanism does or does not require such apparently illiberal measures to be enforced against members of a minority group – a minority group that is particularly disadvantaged and discriminated against at that.Which side is right? The first thing to say is that although assimilation into the republic does require the adoption of a specific culture it does not, contrary to appearances, require a change of culture. It is for this reason, as we shall notice in a later chapter, that republicans have often preferred to distinguish what is required as integration rather than the wholesale cultural transformation that assimilation may seem to imply. Those born in France or coming to it from outside do not, of course, enter a situation in which they can contribute to a republican culture ab initio. A republican culture has already been formed and in order to contribute to it they must first absorb it. This is why education is of such importance in republicanism. For it is by education that the republican citizen is formed. It is no accident, then, that ‘l’affaire du foularde’ centres on schools. In schools things are learnt, not unlearnt; an identity is formed, not discarded. Other pre-existing identities, religious, linguistic or whatever, are at least in theory compatible with the new identity through their location in the private sphere as against the public one where the national identity is formed and displayed. True, the new identity may be harder to acquire from some cultural backgrounds than from others. The Islamic identification of religious and political prescriptions may seem to create a particularly unfavourable background for the formation of republican identity. But while the republican state may not be the one the Muslim would ideally be in, there seems no reason in principle why she should not be able to grasp its guiding values and participate in it wholeheartedly. Having said this, one must go on immediately to observe that the culture of the republican state will be formed from the materials provided by its dominant groups, putting others at a disadvantage not only in their republican acculturation but in their influence on the way its values are to be understood. For example, a particular language, French, is adopted as the language of the state – not Breton, Occitan, Basque and so forth. Or, to address our present example, girls going bare-headed indoors is taken as the norm, not their wearing headscarves. Now it may seem that cultural minorities are doubly disadvantaged. For in being asked to adopt a new identity do they not risk losing an old one, whatever the avowed aim of assimilation? It is 111


important to see that there is no way that the republic can take cognisance of this danger by recognising the existence within the political arena of cultural groups.All it can do is appreciate the position of individuals and not make the requirements for citizenship more onerous than necessary. Indeed it would be wise to be accommodating, for otherwise those who feel their culture threatened may seek to advance their minority interest above that of the state as a whole. The state should not do, what the French state certainly did do, namely suppress minority cultures in the furtherance of national unity. No purely republican principles could justify such a course. What line, then, should a republican take on the Muslim scarves? The account of republican citizenship I have offered suggests no definitive answer. But this is, in fact, just as it should be. The debate in France exemplifies exactly the kind of deliberation through which such questions receive an answer in a republic. It concerns, for example, what constitutes equality of treatment for members of different cultures. It concerns what degree of personal liberty is compatible with equality of treatment. In particular it concerns how and where the boundary between the public and the private is to be drawn. But it leaves, of course, all these matters in the hands of the people as a whole. It is not a liberal outcome, and that is precisely the objection that liberals make to the way in which republican communitarianism seeks to accommodate cultural difference. It is in this vein that Kymlicka, for example, criticises Michael Walzer, whose communitarianism displays elements of republicanism: Since sensibilities and intuitions about justice are not shared in multinational states, relations between groups cannot be based on justice. Minority relations must, therefore, be decided on grounds of ‘mutual accommodation’ . . . or by the simple exercise of majority power (as Walzer concedes will occur).20 The republican response to such criticism is threefold. First, that states comprising different cultural groups should not be viewed as ‘multinational’, since it is political not antecedent cultural membership that determines nationality. Second, that while different cultural groups may have divergent sensibilities and intuitions about justice this does not mean that their relations ‘cannot be based on justice’ – only that they must be based on principles of justice which they can agree between themselves; and nothing follows from their constituting different cultures to show this to be impossible.Third, that in arriving at such principles ‘the simple exercise of majority power’ constitutes 112

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an abuse of the republican system; for in the republic the fact that these are the ‘sensibilities and intuitions’ of one’s own cultural group should be irrelevant to determining what sensibilities and intuitions one should follow in deliberating upon the principles of justice applicable in a multicultural society.Whether this response to liberal criticism is adequate will depend, however, not only upon whether such republican deliberation is in principle possible, but on whether it is in fact possible for people who have the kinds of social identities that they do. It is worth noticing that in this respect republicanism differs from the Habermasian dialogical approach discussed at the beginning of the preceding chapter. For republicanism need not presuppose that there are some general a priori principles for conducting politics which any arbitrary collection of people can discover.Whether people can arrive at a common politics is a contingent matter and what sort of politics they arrive at may vary from case to case. CULTURAL COMMUNITARIANISM

Nearly five centuries after Cicero’s De Republica, St Augustine composed another work of Roman political philosophy, and one of a very different character, whose influence was to be fully felt only long after that of classical republicanism and in sharp opposition to it. In De Republica, as we have noticed, Cicero denies the title of a people or community to those who are not united by a ‘bond of justice’. It is this feature of Cicero’s republican definition of community that Augustine draws upon in his great work The City of God, to reach the more radical conclusion that ‘that commonwealth never existed because there never was real justice in the community’.21 Republican communities like those that Cicero discerned in Rome and Athens never existed, according to Augustine, because: Justice is found where God, the one supreme God, rules an obedient City according to his grace, forbidding sacrifice to any being save himself alone; and where in consequence the soul rules the body in all men who belong to this City and obey God and the reason faithfully rules the vices in a lawful system of subordination; so that just as the individual righteous man lives on the basis of faith which is active in love, so the association, or people, of righteous men lives on the same basis of faith, active in love, the love with which a man loves God as God ought to be loved, and loves his neighbour as himself. But where this justice 113


does not exist, there certainly is no ‘association of men united by a common sense of right and by a community of interest’.22 Here Augustine takes Cicero’s own definition of a community and denies its application to the non-Christian states of the ancient world on the grounds that only the Christian conception will yield a system that can properly be regarded as a system of justice. In doing so he denies that a distinction can be drawn between a shared conception of the good that people might have as members of a political society, and the conception they have as individuals with specific cultural attachments, in particular those of Christian belief.Their identities are homogeneous in a way that the public/private fissure of republicanism prevents them from being, and, what is more, they display none of the internal complexity that the ancients’ ability to worship at more than one altar permitted them. People are, instead, identified as, for example, Christians and, ideally, they have their own ‘city’ in consequence of that identity. It is important to see how it is Augustine’s quite unrepublican views about social identity that are at work here, in order to understand the move he makes after rejecting Cicero’s account of political communities. For Augustine does not want to deny that we can in some sense distinguish peoples or communities from ‘any and every association of the population’, and he accepts that the Roman state ‘certainly was a commonwealth to some degree, according to more plausible definitions’.23 His task, then, is to provide such an alternative definition.What he offers is that ‘a people is the association or multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love.’ ‘It follows’, he continues, ‘that to observe the character of a particular people we must examine the objects of its love,’ and he concludes that ‘by this definition of ours the Roman people is a people and its estate is indubitably a commonwealth.’24 The same goes, he comments, for the Athenians or other Greeks, the Assyrians ‘or indeed . . . any other nation whatsoever’.All these count as communities on Augustine’s alternative definition, although as examples of ‘the city of the impious’ they are specifically contrasted with the City of God which would alone exemplify community as understood according to Cicero’s definition. In his definition Augustine locates the community not in a type of organisation so structured as to secure common interests, but in terms of the common character of its members – a character constituted by the sharing of values, so that it is different values which mark out the different nations one from another. It is, in other words, cultural groups, on one understanding of culture, that 114

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constitute nations with their attendant rights to statehood.And it is this understanding of culture and community which gave rise to cultural nationalism, some 1,400 years after Augustine, in the works of German Romantic thinkers like Herder.25 The kind of communitarianism which cultural nationalism exhibits, and which I shall dub cultural communitarianism, is very different from republicanism. It identifies the common goal that its members seek and whose fulfilment constitutes their common good as the realisation of the group’s shared values itself.What unites members in the pursuit of a common good is that they see themselves as having shared values: they agree about the objects of their love, in Augustine’s phrase. And they do this because their identities are embedded in that of the community in a very strong sense, namely that they identify themselves, perhaps first and foremost, as members of it. They do not just find themselves shaped by the values of those around them: they acknowledge these values through seeing themselves as members of the community constituted by the pursuit of such values, whether or not they can be articulate about them.The two points are related. For the values in question characterise what is taken to be good for the group, not necessarily for people in general. They are analogous to individual ideals, which are not necessarily generalisable to others. But then those espousing the values need to know for which group their realisation is good, and must thus be able to identify those with whom they are going to pursue it.The criterion of membership is, to extend Augustine’s model a little, a confessional one. Furthermore, since – as indicated earlier – cultural identity is viewed as homogeneous, so that it does not characterise only one aspect of the self, membership of the cultural community is not just one social good among others: it is the over-arching one which makes other goods possible, since the values of the community are those whereby the value of other relationships is judged. It is clear from this account that a cultural community so understood is not essentially a political community, as is the republican one. It is rather the case that in order to be a well-functioning political community a group already needs to be a cultural community in sharing a substantive conception of the good, which politics can then put into effect.There are two important consequences of this. First, the group that forms the cultural community is picked out by virtue of just those characteristics that make it a community, namely its shared culture, rather than by virtue of features such as common occupation of a place which may or may not lead to a group becoming a community 115


in the republican sense. Second, what makes the cultural group a community is not some set of institutions or other structural characteristics: it is the shared spirit – the love of certain objects – which unites people into one. Of course this will not come without some form of social organisation. But there is no way of specifying this social organisation in such a way that a group possessing it constitutes a community, as under republicanism a certain set of relationships and political institutions regulating them can be specified. For what kind of social organisation the community has will depend upon the values it espouses, and therefore cannot be specified in general terms. This explains why it is that communitarians, of whom cultural communitarians are by far the commoner sort, so often seem reluctant to answer the charge of critics that they have not said what they mean by community.26 Nevertheless, something can be said about the nature of the cultural community. For communitarians of the sort under discussion criticise contemporary political societies on the grounds that they lack the benefits that cultural communities deliver. They are deficient in the social goods that arise from rootedness in a comprehensive and established culture – the goods, for example, of confidence in one’s own actions and understanding of and trust in those of others. They are deficient, in particular, in the unreflective harmony which is brought by the sharing of values and the common pursuit of them, and for which no formal institutions having this as an explicit objective are required. The politics of the cultural community implied here is reminiscent of Gemeinschaft (the notion due to Tönnies which we met earlier) by contrast with Gesellschaft – the community in which one is born and reared, discovering one’s identity through forming attachments and allegiances, by contrast with the association one joins for specified purposes that one has independently of membership. The former operates through what Tönnies calls ‘natural will’, whereby one finds oneself pursuing ends in common with one’s fellows, the latter through the ‘rational will’ of voluntary purposeful association. The former provides, in contemporary jargon, one’s ‘primary socialisation’, the latter only a secondary and derivative one. The shift from Cicero’s republican account of community to Augustine’s confessional one is mirrored, I suggested, nearly a millennium and a half later, in the rise of cultural nationalism. Recent writers like Martin Thom27 and Maurizio Viroli28 have wanted to emphasise the rupture that occurred around the end of the eighteenth century between an Enlightenment vision of the rational objects of political 116

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allegiance, and a Romantic dream of the historically sanctioned and culturally compulsory objects of allegiance – between, that is to say, the republicanism rooted in Classical thought and the cultural nationalism of Herder and Fichte. Not least important in this transition from one form of allegiance to another, differently founded one was a change from one type of entity as eliciting allegiance to another – from the city to the tribe, as Thom calls it. Allegiance to the city, or more generally to the territorially individuated group, consists in being motivated to pursue a common good conceived of as a set of interests whose value can be negotiated and shared – a process for which suitable institutions are required. Allegiance to the tribe, by contrast, is allegiance to the culturally individuated group. It consists in keeping faith, in not departing from the values the adhesion to which makes the group a group. For departure from these values on any scale would destroy the group’s collective existence. The change from the city to the tribe as the focus of allegiance is momentous precisely because it imposes preconditions on those with whom one should associate in the pursuit of a common good which were absent under republicanism – preconditions arising from the way the cultural community is constructed. CULTURAL NATIONALISM

Cultural communitarianism of the sort we have been looking at erects a quite specific model of the cultural community, namely a self-identifying community of common values.These values, we have assumed, are those that can be thought of as characterising a people’s whole way of life. But we have not yet looked at how such a community might relate to ethnic or national identities.Three possibilities come to mind: that these cultural communities comprise ethnic groups; that they comprise national groups; and that they comprise both just because national groups are ethnic groups. The first position, that cultural communities comprise non-national ethnic groups, is hard to combine with the view that community loyalties underpin political ones. If we reject this view then we need a quite separate account of what generates political loyalty, perhaps a liberal one in which the state is seen as providing a neutral framework within which different ethnic groups may pursue their diverse values in safety. We have, however, already seen some of the difficulties attendant on this conception. A further difficulty arises if the role of the state is seen as more than minimal and includes the provision of social welfare. For this an acknowledgement of mutual obligation is 117


required. But if this sense of social solidarity is confined to the ethnic group then arguably a state which consists of a collection of such groups will be unable to call on it in support of a state-wide welfare system. Just such considerations are called upon by David Miller in criticism of Iris Marion Young’s multiculturalist position.29 Young, as we shall later see in more detail, envisages citizens participating in politics as members of ethnic and other groups rather than consigning these identities to the private sphere, although the politics that results must show equal respect for all groups and contribute to their flourishing. This is no doubt a hard balance to strike and Miller is of the opinion that its actual result will be conflict about the distribution of resources, in which dominant groups will win out and members of subordinate ones fail to obtain a fair share of welfare. However that may be, a multiculturalist like Young will have to argue for political loyalty to such a state on the grounds that the equal respect shown to ethnic groups is a good for each of them. But this presupposes a disposition to see something of value in each which may or may not be forthcoming. Whether it is will likely have to do with whether openness and toleration are values for those groups called upon to show respect. Yet the problems of ethnic difference often arise precisely when they are not. Miller is led to embrace the second option mentioned above, namely of taking the nation to be a cultural community whose internal solidarity can underpin political loyalties.Thus the scope of the political community is set as that at which a welfare system can function best by providing the widest range of people with benefits, for the nation is the highest level of community with sufficient solidarity to nurture it. Indeed it is partly constitutive of a group being a nation that it involves such mutual commitment. But these are not commitments generated by ethnicity, which Miller distinguishes from nationality as requiring common descent and certain shared cultural features – ‘language, religion, etc’ – different kinds of which can in principle co-exist within a nation, such that it is ‘possible for ethnicity and nationality to co-exist, neither threatening to drive out the other’.30 A key difference, then, is that one can become a member of a nation other than by birth and without abandoning key features of the culture into which one is first inducted. If the cultural community relevant to politics is the non-ethnic national group then the potentially exclusive consequences of linking statehood to shared ethnicity may be avoided. Yet Miller’s view of the national community does have clear consequences for the terms on which immigration, for example, may be 118

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undertaken, and, by extension, for those on which different ethnic groups can be combined into a single national one. For while Miller holds that national communities are constituted by mutual recognition, the recognition in question depends upon a belief in shared characteristics, namely those that ‘in the past [were] often referred to as “a national character”, but which I prefer to describe as a common public culture’. This may be the result of ‘ethnic mixing’, so that, Miller continues, ‘immigration need not pose problems, provided only that immigrants come to share in a common national identity, to which they may contribute their own distinctive ingredients.’31 Though this may, he concedes, be difficult for them, it ‘is not an argument against national identities, but an argument for national identities that have a clear focus and are as far as possible independent of group-specific cultural values’.32 Miller may have underestimated the difficulty. For in tacitly rejecting the republican justification for making common cause with others, which he dubs the ‘lifeboat model’,33 namely that we share a common predicament, Miller demands that those who would be compatriots must take on the obligations arising from the ‘historic identity’ which national continuity confers. For it would seem to be in national history that national values are displayed, and national history, therefore, must play a key role in national education. It is, however, one thing to learn about someone’s history, quite another to make oneself part of it, and it is not clear that identification with a national community so conceived is possible for immigrants, or indeed for previously oppressed groups like the Welsh or Scots within Great Britain. Miller’s likening of the process of immigrant acculturation to marrying into a family34 is unhelpful as a reply to this objection precisely because the analogy involves the very same problems as that which it is intended to illuminate. And the problems of a ‘mixed’ marriage may well be solved by appeal to the ‘lifeboat model’ anyway. The other principal objection to Miller’s option is that the allegedly national community is no community anyway.35 The supposedly common culture which grounds the identities of members of the nation is a political contrivance which lacks the depth necessary to perform this function. Miller is critical of the suggestion that national identity is somehow second-rate when compared with ethnic identity, because, he believes, none is pure and all answer to political imperatives. But to the extent to which national identity is a matter of deliberate formation – as Miller envisages an Irish identity which resolves the problem of Northern Ireland might be36 – then it is hard to see how 119


it could be the embedded identity of cultural communitarianism. If it is thought that such an identity must be ethnic, and that the allegiances it involves need to be drawn upon to underpin political loyalty, then the third option mentioned above has to be embraced and national groups identified with ethnic ones. Here the very depth of ethnic identity that is demanded creates problems in respect of immigrants and national minorities which we shall look at in more detail later in the book.Why, though, should we trouble ourselves with this position? Why should we allow that ethnicity can ever underpin the kinds of political claim that nationality makes, when religion, for example, removed from its ethnic associations, does not? If we discard the conservative arguments looked at in the last chapter then no justificatory answer appears to be available. However, much as we may regret it, ethnic identifications have developed a hold over people which cannot be ignored. As soon as people come to think of themselves as who they are by virtue of values which they share with a limited group of people, then their scope for the kind of consensus- building engagement with others required by republicanism – or even by the sort of nationalism favoured by Miller – diminishes and maybe disappears. For any adoption of wider consensual values will look like a betrayal of antecedent cultural ones and ultimately the obliteration of that cultural identity. But this kind of self-identification has, it appears, become the norm and its ethnic form is pre-eminent, and pre-eminent precisely because it does supposedly establish a comprehensive primary identity to which other kinds – religious, vocational, sexual or political – take second place. Ethnic identity then comes to ground claims made in the name of nationality. It should not, however, be thought that these claims therefore reflect membership of any real ethnic community.The kind of self-identification with which we are dealing no doubt involves a belief in such a community. But under contemporary conditions such a belief is most likely false, and communitarian considerations can do nothing to justify national claims. In the following chapter, we shall look at some theoretical considerations concerning the nature of communities and the processes of identity formation which tend to support this pessimistic conclusion. NOTES 1. Aristotle, Politics, 1252a1. I have used various translations and adapted them in some cases. 2. Ibid. 1253a19.

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3. Ibid. 1281a42. 4. Ibid. 1276b16. 5. They are abstracted and synthesised from the work of those political philosophers commonly viewed as communitarian (not all of whom will hold to precisely these positions or this combination), namely Michael Sandel, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor and Michael Walzer. For detailed analysis and discussion see S. Mulhall and A. Swift, Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). 6. Aristotle, Politics, 1260a13. 7. Ibid. 1261a22. 8. Ibid. 1253a7. 9. This is not to claim that all republicanism is communitarian in any sense, only that an important strand can be so thought of. 10. Cicero, De Republica, I.25 (many translations: again I have adapted them for my purposes). Cicero’s word for people – ‘populus’ – means a people united in a political community. 11. Cicero, De Republica, III.31. 12. Ibid. III.22. 13. Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book IV, ch. 1; Book II, ch. III. 14. Quoted in G. Kates, ‘Jews into Frenchmen’, Social Research 56 (1989), p. 229. 15. It is, in Benjamin Constant’s phrase, ‘liberty of the ancients’, not ‘liberty of the moderns’. 16. See I. Hampsher-Monk, A History of Modern Political Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 220. The best contemporary exponent is Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 17. S. Johnson,‘Taxation no Tyranny’ [pamphlet of 1775], repr. in D. J. Greene (ed.), Samuel Johnson: Political Writings (New Haven:Yale UP, 1977), p. 454. 18. E. Balibar and I.Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class (London:Verso, 1991), p. 24. 19. Discussed by Catherine Audard in ‘Political Liberalism, Secular Republicanism: two answers to the challenges of pluralism’, in D. Archard (ed.), Philosophy and Pluralism (Cambridge: CUP, 1996). I have benefited from hearing an unpublished paper by Jeremy Jennings. 20. W. Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: OUP, 1989), p. 231. It should be noted that Kymlicka would regard France as a ‘polyethnic’ rather than a ‘multinational’ state, strictly speaking (see Ch. 8, ‘Pluralism’, below); so that, though he would be unhappy about a democratic resolution of the headscarves issue, the cultural claims of Muslims, as immigrants, are limited. 21. Augustine, The City of God, II.21. 22. Ibid. XIX.23. 23. Ibid. II.21. 24. Ibid. XIX.24. 25. It was Carl J. Friedrich who identified this influence: see ‘The concept of community’ in his (ed.) Community (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1959).

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26. For example J.Waldron,‘Minority cultures and the cosmopolitan alternative’, in W. Kymlicka (ed.), The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: OUP, 1995), p. 95. 27. M.Thom, Republics, Nations and Tribes (London: Verso, 1995). 28. M.Viroli, For Love of Country (Oxford: OUP, 1995). 29. As expressed in her Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990): see also D. Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: OUP, 1995), pp. 130–40. 30. Miller, On Nationality, p. 21. 31. Ibid. pp. 25–6. 32. Ibid. p. 137. 33. Ibid. pp. 41–2. 34. D. Miller, ‘Nationality: Some replies’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 14 (1997), p. 78. 35. Cp. J. O’Neill,‘Should communitarians be nationalists?’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 11 (1994); and for Miller’s reply, ‘Nationality: Some replies’, pp. 77–8. 36. Miller, ‘Nationality: Some replies’, p. 80.

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6 MARXISM AND POSTMODERNISM

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THE MARXIST CRITIQUE

The Roman republic, which was a model for many much later nation states, was not a political community where all the inhabitants were citizens. Among those who were not were slaves, upon whose labour the economy of the republic depended, but whose wellbeing was no part of the common good at which it aimed. Despite both the absence of such institutionalised slavery and the formal equality of employer and employee in the modern state, there is, Karl Marx argued, an analogy between it and the Roman republic which undermines the Roman republic’s claim to provide a satisfactory model of political community. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another . . . The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.1 So starts the Communist Manifesto, in which Marx and Engels call upon workers to recognise their common class interest in opposition to that of their capitalist employers. ‘In the days of classical Rome’, writes 123


Marx,‘the slave was bound in chains; the wage worker is bound to his owner by invisible threads.The appearance of independence is kept up by means of the perpetual change from one wage lord to another, and by the legal fiction of the contract’2 – a fiction, that is to say, because the worker has to sell her labour power to live: she cannot choose not to enter into this sort of relationship, from which it is the capitalist who benefits by exploiting his employees. The conflict of interest between capitalist and worker vitiates, Marx argues, the claims of the state to represent the general good of a community. ‘The “general good”’, he writes, ‘is the illusory form of communal life’, which is ‘divorced from the real interests of individual and community’, though this illusory communal life is ‘always based . . . on the real ties existing in every family and tribal conglomeration (such as flesh and blood, language, division of labour . . . and other interests)’.3 Marx’s contention is that the fundamental determinant of historical change is class conflict, not, as it may superficially appear, conflict between national or other groups. Class membership is fixed objectively by one’s place in the productive process, not subjectively by one’s shared identification with others, though the transition from a ‘class in itself ’ to a ‘class for itself ’ which is necessary for collective action depends upon making such an identification. Thus identification with a nation or other group may hamper the emergence of the class-consciousness which workers need in order to combat their oppression, and it can thereby serve the interests of the capitalist class. The Marxist critique of communitarianism depends, then, upon subjecting the claims of any soi-disant community to scrutiny in order to ascertain whether the relationships it involves are genuinely communal or are, rather, illusorily so, masking a reality of exploitation and oppression. It is not the communitarian ideal as such that is the object of critique. Rather, what is criticised is the assumption that the communitarian ideal can be realised simply by setting it before people as something to be striven for, without changing the fundamental relations of production which underlie any society. These relations in turn depend upon the mode of production whereby one class may control the wealth needed for the productive process. In these circumstances no amount of exhortation can be expected to persuade the members of that class to advance some interest more general than its own. Thus, Marx notes, thinking no doubt of the decay of the Roman republic, ‘all previous forms of society foundered on the development of wealth – or, which amounts to the same thing, on the development of social productive forces. Therefore ancient philosophers who were 124

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aware of this bluntly denounced wealth as destructive of community.’4 The consequence of this analysis for political philosophy is that the claims made on behalf of any national or ethnic group need to be scrutinised in order to see what interests they serve and, Marx would have added, what contribution accepting them would make to overcoming capitalist oppression. Marx and Engels conclude the Communist Manifesto with the call ‘WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!’5 – unite, that is to say, to combat global capitalism, in relation to which workers share a common interest, obscured as this may be by national or ethnic differences. Earlier, Marx and Engels answer the charge that communists desire to ‘abolish countries and nationality’ by remarking that ‘the working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.’6 Nations are, at least for the most part, bourgeois institutions, in the sense that the marking of certain differences as national serves the interests of sections of the capitalist class. To this extent Marxists have no reason to support a nationalist agenda.As Engels wrote in opposition to the Italian patriot, Mazzini, ‘The International recognises no country; it desires to unite, not dissolve. It is opposed to the cry for Nationality, because it tends to separate people from people, and is used by tyrants to create prejudices and antagonism’.7 This insistence that national claims be tested against the real interests of ordinary people is one of the most valuable legacies of Marxism. It is, however, at most half the story. For Marx and his successors have three other criteria in terms of which support for nationalist causes can be justified. The first and least attractive stems from the Marxist theory of historical development which envisages a progression from feudal through capitalist to communist forms of social production. In particular, the organisation of capitalist production and distribution at a certain stage of this development requires a culturally unified, territorially bounded nation-state. Since capitalism is a necessary preliminary to communism, national bourgeois revolutions against feudalism may need to be supported.Thus Marx supported the Polish struggle for independence from Russia in 1848, since the former was industrialising and the latter still largely feudal. The downside of such progressivism was the Marxist attitude to what, borrowing from Hegel,8 were thought of as nations with no history, or as Engels put it, ‘the ruins of peoples, which are still found here and there and which are no longer capable of a national existence.’ These will be ‘absorbed by the larger nations and either become a part of them or maintain themselves as ethnographic monuments without political significance.’9 Support for 125


independence for such peoples, for example the southern Slavs in 1848, would be a retrograde step, simply preventing them from advancing beyond their peasant economies. There is little to be said for this strain of Marxist thought. In fact it had little influence on the policies of socialist states towards smaller nations, which were in fact decided largely on strategic criteria: what policies towards nations and other groups would further working-class interests in general? Larger groups, picked out as nations, were conceded a right of self-determination by Lenin – a right enshrined in the constitution of the former Soviet Union which eventually facilitated its relatively bloodless dissolution. Not, of course, that this outcome was envisaged by its founders, who thought of the right as strengthening the Soviet state by inhibiting the coercion of one nation by another and thereby preventing antagonism between nations, just as the right of divorce is sometimes taken to strengthen the institution of marriage. This is, in effect, a utilitarian justification for the acknowledgement of certain national rights. Similarly, in the case of smaller or more widely dispersed groups – ‘nationalities’ as they are sometimes called in socialist circles, by contrast with nations10 – cultural rights, in particular language rights, need to be recognised in order to prevent resentment and damaging divisions among people whose interests actually coincide. The difficulty with such utilitarian arguments arises, of course, when one tries to calculate what system of rights would best serve the general good, construed here as the interests of the working class. The third Marxist criterion for supporting national and other groups escapes this difficulty. It is simply that such groups deserve support when they are the specific victims of oppression. Lenin saw national revolts against oppression as arising particularly in the colonies, where the colonial petty bourgeoisie as well as the proletariat were exploited by imperialism.11 The fact that the revolts might, in consequence, be bourgeois ones did not invalidate the case for supporting them. For in such cases the only politically possible focus for combining to resist oppression was a national one. In many instances anti-colonialist struggles have involved racial conflict, and the oppression of some races by elements from others is regarded by Marxists as a particular form of class oppression. Race may, for example, as Immanuel Wallerstein suggests,12 be a way of marking off the labour pool in the periphery of the world economy from its core – a pool of labour that is markedly more unjustly treated than white workers are. Support for anti-racist arrangements to prevent such oppression is, in these circumstances, a requirement of justice. But it stems, according 126


to the Marxist analysis, from seeing essentially the same processes at work in racism as operate in the legitimation of class oppression generally, and not distinctively different ones. It is the injustice of such oppression which is the driving force of Marxist attitudes towards race and nationality. IDEOLOGY

In Marxist philosophy the failure of working people to realise that their fundamental identity is located in their common class membership is explained by the power of ideology. Ideology is the system of ideas employed in politics, law, morality, religion and so forth through which people conceptualise their social lives. But these ideas are not innocent. They do not simply reflect the reality they are used to describe, for they are, Marx stresses, human creations and as such determined by the conditions under which they are produced. (Readers will recognise here the fundamental thought underlying social constructionism.) Thus ideology is determined, in the final analysis, by the economic relations which shape people’s social conditions, rather than these relations being determined by ideology.This is an aspect of the Marxist distinction between the base – constituted by economic relations – and the superstructure – the forms of human consciousness which ideologies exemplify: ‘life is not determined by consciousness,’ as Marx and Engels famously express it, ‘but consciousness by life.’13 The base thus has explanatory priority over the superstructure, even though, as a result of ideology, it will appear that economic relations result from and are justified by the ideas about society which we have – ideas, for example, of free contractual relations between members of a liberal nation-state. The conditions under which ideology is produced have, according to the Marxist theory of society, two crucial and related features. First, since social relations are inherently conflictual, ideology provides the ‘forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out’. Yet it is evident that the conflictual nature of social relations is not immediately apparent in these ideological forms – in, for example, the form of a contract of employment – so that ‘in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down, as in a camera obscura’.14 This is not just a generally observed fact. Its truth results from the role of ideology in making sense of social life. When this social reality is conflictual it may be easier to try to make sense of it in non-conflictual ideological terms than to grasp the nettle and try to resolve the conflict 127


in a practical way.This leads us to the second and consequential feature of social relations which has repercussions for the character of ideology. It is that in class conflict a dominant class will emerge, as, under capitalism, the bourgeoisie comes out on top. Now evidently the dominant class has no motive for changing the status quo and every interest in justifying it. Since this class will control the material conditions for the production of ideology – publishing, universities and so forth – it follows that ideology will largely consist of the ideas of the dominant class, whose interests it serves and whose position it reinforces and reproduces.As a result, the reality their ideology describes will continue to elude a more transparent inspection. Here are, then, two connected but somewhat different explanations of this feature of ideology which Marx thought of as obfuscating or mystificatory, by contrast with the clear-sighted character of science.A crude way of characterising it is as false consciousness – a system of inaccurate representations of reality.This is, however, misleading, especially when combined with the view that ideology in the superstructure is only an epiphenomenon of the real processes at work in the base which are what bring about social consequences. Ideology is not, though, simply representational, differing from good science only in depicting things incorrectly. Racial discourse, for example, as we saw above in discussing Robert Miles, is not to be thought of as providing just a scientifically groundless taxonomy of peoples. Rather it provides a way of constructing categories which regulate the way in which people are to be treated. As such it directly affects social practice just as much as, say, the institution of employment contracts does. Ideology provides not just a way of describing social life but of constituting and regulating the relationships within it, even if the relationships it constructs are in the last instance to be explained in economic terms, as Wallerstein, for example, explains racial distinctions in terms of distinct positions in the economic order. We do not, I think, need to go beyond Marx himself in order to make these points. But they were brought out more explicitly by Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist concerned to defend Italian national unity as the necessary basis for proletarian power – a unity threatened by northern Italian racism towards southern Italians. Gramsci wished on the one hand to counter the ‘false consciousness’ conception of ideology by insisting on the universality of ideological processes, which are, he believed, at work as much in ordinary people’s attempts to become conscious of their relative powerlessness, and to overcome it by constructing new and resistant roles for themselves, as 128


in their acceptance of the dominant conceptions. On the other hand, he sought to undermine the epiphenomenalist interpretation precisely by emphasising the power of such new ideas to effect social change. The test for them then becomes that of their efficacy in enabling people to resist oppression rather than their correspondence with some nonideologically discernible social reality.15 These aspects of Gramsci’s thought are utilised in his theory of hegemony, which has been of considerable influence in the understanding of cultural identity. Hegemony is domination achieved through consent rather than coercion, and, in particular, through gaining the leading place in a battle of ideas. Now while the dominant class will always strive to gain this leading place, the existence of ideological competition does not guarantee it unqualified success in winning over, as it must if it is to secure consent, the mass of ordinary people.There is scope, therefore, for challenges to it in the construction of culture. But, since the aim of such a challenge is equally to win people over, two consequences follow. First, an ideological challenge must build upon existing cultural material, expunging what runs counter to the interests of the oppressed. Second, and similarly, it must ally itself with positions which initially represent different class interests in order to form a hegemonic unit which can better achieve the consent of society as a whole than the one which it replaces. This is achieved by constructing a culture which can better represent the experience of people generally. Gramsci envisaged just such a process as needed for the formation of a national culture in Italy, following the failure of the Italian bourgeoisie to locate one, as a result of their semi-colonial exploitation of the south. Yet that semi-colonial system itself was imposed hegemonically through the articulation of oppositions between, in Stuart Hall’s words, ‘city and countryside, peasantry and proletariat, clientelism and modernism, feudalised and industrialised social structures’16 which disguised the common interests of northern and southern workers. The French structuralist Louis Althusser developed Gramsci’s account of ideology in a way that removed it even further, at least in one direction, from false consciousness, by insisting that ‘in the majority of cases these representations have nothing to do with “consciousness” . . . it is above all as structures that they impose on the vast majority of men, not via their “consciousness”’.17 Such structures are precisely what create human societies in general, taking on the role of serving the interests of a dominant class only in appropriate class-based societies. Where ideology performs this role it does so through what Althusser 129


terms the Ideological State Apparatus, which reproduces the relations of production to the same ends as the Repressive State Apparatus but by different means – by Marx’s ‘invisible threads’ of employment contracts and so forth rather than by the actual chains of slavery or imprisonment. Here, however, Althusser unjustifiably narrows the scope of ideological processes from their realisation of class power, which is pervasive, to that of the power of the state, which is more limited.18 Althusser does recognise, though, the variety of Ideological State Apparatuses – educational, legal, political, cultural and so forth – thereby revealing the kind of stakes that are played for in attempts to gain control of a state, by, for example, a nationalist movement. What ideology accomplishes, Althusser asserts, is in fact no less than the constitution of individuals as subjects of thought and action. It does so by positioning them at particular points within the structures which form it, isolated from which individuals would be incapable of intelligible thought and action, and thus not be subjects at all. The process by which they become so Althusser refers to as interpellation. I am interpellated as, say, a European, an English-speaker and so forth. It is a concept as uncompromisingly functionalist in its picture of individual identity as anything in the Durkheimian model of culturally shaped subjects which we looked at earlier. ‘Marxist philosophy’, Althusser comments, ‘must break with the idealist category of the “Subject” as Origin, Essence and Cause’.19 But Althusser understands this break in a way that makes human agents impotent to affect their history by reshaping their own identities. For, in sharp contrast to Gramsci, he can offer only a stark choice between the subject existing prior to social structures and the subject totally determined by them. The stark choice between ‘subjectivity as the passive effect of structures or subjectivity as self-determination’20 is rejected by Ernesto Laclau, who has developed Althusser’s thought in a direction that disengages it from Marxist orthodoxy. Laclau construes interpellation as a process by which individuals identify with certain subject positions, which they must do if hegemony is to achieve its consensual purpose. The structures of ideology can, therefore, never fully determine the subject, who remains, as Laclau puts it, a ‘lack’. For this reason, a subject can transform her identity since ‘the production of the effect is part of the construction of the identity of the agent producing it.’21 Ingenious as it is, however, this way between the horns of a dilemma fails to bring out why, according to a Marxist account, the subject might wish to transform her identity. It is because the identity made available to her in the dominant ideology is experienced as an oppressive one; and 130


transformation is liberatory because of that, not just because it is the exercise of existential freedom. Marx himself measured such oppression by the extent to which it ran counter to our ‘species-being’, to what, in an essentialistic sense, we really are. But no such homage to Aristotle and the ancients is needed for us to distinguish identities on which a liberatory politics can be grounded from those on which it cannot. The question to be asked from a broadly socialist standpoint about national and ethnic identities is whether they are of the first or the second kind. And the question to be asked about the analysis of such identities is whether it provides the tools we need for determining which they are.This is not necessarily to set science in opposition to ideology as a means of unmasking the ethical pretensions of identities, but simply to recognise their essentially political character and the consequent need to be able to employ an analysis of them in the evaluation of political arrangements. The Marxist legacy is to force us to get beneath the terms of political debate in order to provide an analysis which can serve this end. POSTSTRUCTURALISM

Contemporary thinking about the constitution of identities has been greatly influenced by the poststructuralist philosopher Michel Foucault, a one-time pupil of Althusser. Foucault’s earlier work can, like Althusser’s, be viewed as structuralist, in the sense of seeking to uncover patterns of signification by the application of a general transhistorical method of analysis. It is, as we have seen, the individual’s position in such a pattern – or discourse, as Foucault terms it – which constitutes him as the particular subject with the kind of identity he has.This feature carries over into poststructuralism, but here the possibility of a general method applicable, though with different results, to different periods is abandoned in favour of an insistence on the historical specificity of any analysis of subjectivity. In Foucault’s work it marks a shift from what he called ‘archaeology’ – the uncovering of structures – to ‘genealogy’ – the story of their historical development. If discourse were simply a system of representations of reality, then our principal interest would be in the adequacy of any particular discourse for its representational purposes. But discourse produces that which it represents in, for example, creating certain sorts of subjectivities in a particular epoch and rendering others unavailable.The driving force behind this aspect of discourse is, the later Foucault maintains, 131


power.The constitution of subjects is, in a more than merely punning sense, subjection.22 Individuals are subjected to processes beyond their control which determine what is possible for them and which shape who they are because they determine how they can even think of what they are and of what they can do.They are thereby subjected to the power that sets these processes in train and is reinforced by them. But in the modern period, Foucault argues, it is the kind of discourse which conveys knowledge that determines this subjection, far more than any overt coercion. Individuals are constituted as subjects by internalising particular modes of discourse which purport to reveal the world as it really is, so that the sort of subjectivity allowed them seems right and natural. It is through such discourses, Foucault explains, that power is exercised: In a society such as ours, but basically in any society, there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterise and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association.We are subjected to the production of truth through discourse and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth.23 So far, one might think, one has an account that parallels that offered by Althusser’s appeal to Ideological State Apparatuses as what bind individuals to the purposes of the state without the need for costly repression. Foucault, however, explicitly opposes such a view: Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere . . . there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between ruler and ruled at the root of power relations.24 Indeed, he goes further than this, insisting that We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.25 The inspiration here is not Marx but Nietzsche, for whom all activity, 132


including the search for knowledge, is driven by the ‘will to power’, so that it is the way that a discourse comes out on top in a battle of ideas which explains its being taken for truth, not vice versa. It is in part such scepticism about Enlightenment conceptions of knowledge as progressive which marks out Foucault as postmodernist. Foucault’s analytical apparatus, or parts of it, are commonly applied to discourses of race and cultural identity in order to bring out both their historical locatedness and their essential connection with relationships of power. Yet this sort of discourse cannot simply be detached from others: it is part and parcel of, in the case of race at least, a system of classification fundamental to science.This is, furthermore, a science in which the bodies of men and women can be viewed as physical objects and thus subjected to the same sort of manipulation as these are.26 The discourse of racial classification and control is able to serve as a vehicle for power relations because of its connections with these wider potentialities of modern discourse, which can be put to many other uses in the exercise of power. It can do so because of its exploitation of, on the one hand, a modern preoccupation with the category of difference and, on the other, with the location of these differences in bodies, constituted precisely as the objects of such description. A finely nuanced application of Foucault’s analytic techniques is to be found in Edward Said’s Orientalism, which investigates the way in which the colonised East was first constructed in Western culture through the discursive processes of literature, ethnography and history concerning the Orient – through, in a word, Orientalism. These practices depended at each point upon setting up a system of binary oppositions between the East and the West created by the West, ‘out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged.’ This centrality arises from the power of the West relative to the East. But, Said insists in Foucauldian vein, Orientalism is not expressive of some nefarious ‘Western’ imperialist plot to hold down the ‘Oriental world.’ It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts . . . it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world.27 It is worth noticing that in this passage Said places ‘Western’ and ‘Oriental’ in scare quotes to bring out that neither has an existence 133


outside of their construction, a construction in which Western subjects are themselves constituted in opposition to Eastern ones, not having a prior existence as subjects in a privileged position of power. A natural way to express this relation between the West and the East, and indeed a way that Said himself authorises, is in terms of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony referred to earlier. But, as critics of Said have pointed out,28 it is far from clear that Foucauldian discourse theory, for which ‘power is everywhere’, is compatible with a theory of hegemony in which power is concentrated in the hands of a dominant group. One does not need to take a Marxist view of this group as a dominant class in order to identify its members as those who benefit at the expense of others from certain discursive practices, and thus to see power as exercised oppressively. Clearly this is how Said sees the power of the West as being exercised in the imperialist objectives served by Orientalism.Yet it is questionable whether Foucauldian theory can capture the idea that there are exercises of oppressive power which therefore ought to be resisted. Foucault believes, in Nietzschean vein, that wherever there is power there is resistance. But resistance itself has no moral authority, unless it is the growth of autonomy that springs from resisting the power of ‘the technologies of economic production, social regulation and communication’.29 This, though, is resistance only to certain modern techniques of power, not to its purposes. Said himself came to appreciate these deficiencies in employing Foucauldian analysis as a possible political tool. He comments on Foucault’s unwillingness to take seriously his own ideas about resistance to power. If power oppresses and controls and manipulates, then everything that resists it is not morally equal to power, is not neutrally and simply a weapon against that power.30 In Culture and Imperialism31 he discuses those movements of cultural resistance which he had omitted from Orientalism, and in particular the development of national identities to counter imperialist categories – a topic to which we shall return shortly. Said does not adequately address, however, the question of what makes these resistant gestures possible if individuals are constituted as subjects by discursive formations that articulate relations of power in which they are subordinate. This will at once be recognised as confronting us with the same stark choice about the nature of the subject that Althusser posited. It is no easier to resolve using a Foucauldian account, and persistently gives rise to problems for those who, like the later Said, both want to recognise 134


the discursive constitution of subjects and also their role in resisting the oppression that this discourse can engender. POSTCOLONIALISM

It is, perhaps, no exaggeration to say that the principal problem arising from bringing together the influences of Marx and those of structuralism is that of showing how resistance to oppression is even possible, given the dominance of the discourse through which the power relations that produce oppression are maintained.A crucial influence here is that of feminism, for the unequal and restrictive treatment of women can only be recognised as unjust and oppressive if the social roles to which they are given access – roles for which such unequal and restrictive treatment appears appropriate – are seen as constructed in the maintenance of power relations, rather than natural. This requires a way of thinking about those roles which draws on aspects of discourse that do not simply reflect male dominance. In different societies with their different cultures there will be more or less scope for such resistant discourses. Similarly, then, the political problem confronting racial, ethnic or national groupings is that of seeing their situation in a way that does not simply reproduce the modes of categorisation of the dominant discourse nor seek solutions only in those made available by it. Thus the options offered by Western liberal democracy – the dominant political discourse of the day – will need to be carefully scrutinised in order to assess the chances of removing oppression from peoples who have not been its beneficiaries. The prior question will be, however, ‘What are their resources for recognising their situation and finding solutions to it?’ A number of Indian thinkers have been particularly concerned with this question, and that for two reasons. First, British rule in India was very successful in creating a ruling elite able to put Western political ideas into practice. Second, however, this elite was rightly suspicious of the applicability of Western ideas, not least because of the traumatic experience of Partition, in which borders were redrawn at least partly because of Western conceptions of the relation between cultural identity and political organisation – conceptions which the Muslim leader, Jinnah, was well able to exploit. One point that postcolonial theorists like Partha Chatterjee, for instance, are able to bring out effectively is that a hegemonic discourse is never total. It co-exists with other discourses which allow resistant political forms to be created. Thus Chatterjee argues that the nationalism of colonial peoples depended 135


upon their ability to refashion the Western nation form from that of a public, economically based identity into a private, spiritual one, in which difference from the coloniser was maintained through an aesthetically distinctive culture. The shortcoming of this strategy is, he believes, the way Western ideas of statehood that are ill-fitting to this kind of cultural community have had to be adapted to it.32 Another Indian thinker associated with the evocatively named Subaltern Studies group of which Chatterjee is a member, Gayatri Spivak, agrees with him that Western ideas need to be drawn upon in resisting the oppression of ex-colonial subjects: ‘the political claims that are most urgent in decolonised spaces are tacitly recognised as coded within the legacy of imperialism: nationhood, constitutionality, citizenship, democracy, even culturalism’.33 But Spivak is anxious to dispel the impression left by Chatterjee that there is an authentic voice of these subjects – the so-called ‘subalterns’ – which might in principle be articulated in opposition to colonial hegemonic discourses. These subjects exist as victims of oppression only through the way they are constituted in such discourses.They lack a consciousness of their shared situation and can articulate resistance only through a multiplicity of voices – for example, of Hindu nationalism – in none of which they speak as subalterns, that is as the sort of victims they really are. Spivak’s response to this situation is to adopt a Marxist politics for purely strategic purposes, while denying that Marxism, as a Western discourse, can capture the reality of ex-colonial existence. But this strategy, of course, is not to offer a method of resistance to Western discourse and the kind of oppressive categorisations it entails, even if it may result in some alleviation of the situation.34 Homi Bhabha, by contrast, does provide an account of how such resistance is possible which springs from a profound analysis of what is involved in cultural hegemony. Bhabha’s account starts off from observations on the strategies of resistance adopted by colonial subjects, but it is evident that he does not intend it to apply only to such situations. His observations are of subject responses to the civilising mission of colonialism which is but one example of the way in which power is exercised, not simply by repression but by changing those subjected to power so that they will conform willingly to its requirements. Yet this creates a paradox, or, as Bhabha puts it, ‘a process of splitting as the condition of subjection’.35 On the one hand, to be subjected to the power of the coloniser the colonised must be represented as other than the coloniser, and must grasp that this is her position. On the other hand, to internalise the coloniser’s values and 136


thus to conform to his norms she must become the same as the coloniser, and be able to represent herself so.This latter act of identification is thus shot through with a recognition of continuing difference. The figure that Bhabha employs to capture this split in the colonial, or indeed any other subject of cultural hegemony is Frantz Fanon’s ‘doubling, dissembling image’ of Black Skin,White Masks – ‘the white man’s artifice inscribed on the black man’s body’.36 It is this splitting within the subject which, Bhabha argues, makes resistance possible, for as he puts it: Resistance is not necessarily an oppositional act of political intention, nor is it the simple negation or exclusion of the ‘content’ of another culture, as a difference once perceived. It is the effect of an ambivalence produced within the rules of recognition of dominating discourses as they articulate the signs of cultural difference and reimplicate them within the deferential relations of colonial power.37 The form that this resistance can take arises from the sort of performances that are involved in identifying with the colonists.They are acts of mimicry, but acts performed by a subject whose otherness makes him an inappropriate person to perform them, so that they mock and subvert that which they mimic. This is what indigenous peoples’ appropriation of Christianity notoriously does, as, more subtly, does the career of a colonial subject like Naipaul’s Mr Biswas – so much more threatening to the colonial authority exercised through European values than is the orthodox Hindu lifestyle of his wife’s relations.38 The result of mimicry of this sort is ‘hybridisation, rather than the noisy commands of colonialist authority or the silent repression of native traditions’.39 But this feature of cultural hegemony necessarily subverts authority. For it is not just that independently identifiable dominant forms become contaminated in their colonial reception. Rather, because in claiming authority they demand recognition, the subversive mimicry which constitutes such recognition is already inscribed in them. Thus Bhabha does not see hegemony as the impinging of one culture upon another, where different cultures can be picked out prior to their impacting upon each other. Instead, what counts as cultural difference is what manifests itself as resistance to attempts to dominate others. It is not something lying behind and explaining the imperfections of mimicry. It is a way of categorising those others over whom power is exercised and by whom it is subverted through just the process that Bhabha outlines. 137


Bhabha applies this account of the process of splitting to nationformation as well as to colonialism. Here too cultural domination must be achieved: ‘The scraps, patches and rags of daily life must be repeatedly turned into the signs of a coherent national culture.’ But this is ‘internally marked by the discourses of minorities, the heterogenous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense locations of cultural difference,’40 so that opposition is not directed at an external and apparently homogeneous cultural hegemony.Yet the dominant story of the nation is constantly under threat from its recipients and requires continual repetition – a ritual that Bhabha sees as crucial to the production and maintenance of national identity. It is, we may say, by such means that national culture is constructed. What Bhabha is keen to emphasise, however, is that there is hybridity even here, and, more generally, he aims to challenge the image of homogeneous, clearly bounded cultures which is assumed by AngloAmerican political philosophers like, for example, Charles Taylor, whom Bhabha singles out for criticism on this score.41 Although specifically designed to show how resistance to cultural domination is possible, Bhabha’s account has attracted a great deal of criticism, most of it analogous to criticisms of the poststructuralist Jacques Derrida, whose deconstruction of binary oppositions between the self and the other, and of the concept of a unified and stable subject, has so much influenced Bhabha. The Marxist thinker, Aijaz Ahmad, for example, criticises what he takes to be Bhabha’s ‘celebration of cultural hybridity’ as playing down the straightforward inequalities of power that are involved in colonialist and other cultural encounters.The question to be asked, says Ahmad, is ‘into whose culture is one to be hybridised and on whose terms? The wilful relegation of this question to obscurity,’ he continues, ‘reveals nevertheless that the underlying logic of this celebratory mode is that of a globalised market place which pretends that all consumers are equally resourceful and in which all cultures are equally available for consumption, in any combination that the consumer desires.’42 Part of this criticism is just: Bhabha does fail to relate the processes of hybridisation to the concrete circumstances of oppression that generate particular modes of resistance, and this is because his account, however it is exemplified, is a perfectly general, historically non-specific one. But Ahmad mistakes Bhabha’s purpose in attributing to him a celebration of hybridity. Hybridity is not itself a strategy of resistance. It is a product of the processes which make resistance to cultural domination possible and, furthermore, it is a feature of all cultural identities, reflection on which 138


enables one to resist the forms of cultural domination which presuppose the homogenising conception of such identities – the homogenising conception that gives rise to oppression. This is a far cry from those vulgarised appeals to hybridity which do indeed fall foul of Ahmad’s criticisms and, far from constituting a form of political resistance, collude in those forms of oppression that result from extending the scope of commodification, in this case to the components of culture itself. POSTMODERN IDENTITIES

What, we may ask, are the implications of poststructuralist approaches to cultural and national identity for a political theory of the sort that can handle claims to cultural or national rights? This, it must be said, is not an easy question to answer, but we can perhaps best address it by reflecting on what poststructuralism and, more broadly, postmodernism amount to as large-scale philosophical enterprises. Poststructuralism aims to undermine a variety of discourses that seek to disclose underlying structures through investigating the systems of classification applied to them. It does so through exposing the instability and relativity to the circumstances of their application that such classificatory systems in fact possess.Thus the individuation of cultures, for example, in terms of systems of differences may be called into question, as it is by Homi Bhabha, through revealing the particular circumstances in which differences are registered as such and observing the destabilising presence of alternatives in the formation of identity. The implications of this line of thought are more radical than those of a social constructionism which emphasises only the arbitrary bases of social identity. For what poststructuralism does is to raise doubts as to whether the construction of such identities does in fact create social groups which have any real existence beyond the repetitive performances through which they are kept in being. Postmodernism may be understood as the philosophy of postmodernity – the contemporary historical period in which the progressive, liberating mission of the Enlightenment has run its course. Postmodernism is characterised by its mistrust of ‘grand narratives’ that tell a story about the nature of human beings, of what they can achieve and of how to achieve it, of which both liberalism and Marxism are instances. Poststructuralism exemplifies postmodernism just because its deconstructive criticisms erode the classificatory systems that such grand narratives presuppose. It follows from this supposed collapse of 139


grand narratives that no over-arching political vision for human emancipation and wellbeing is possible: the dominant liberal picture of a world of secular nation-states with full cultural rights turns out to be as groundless as a discredited Marxist internationalism. In either case the reason is the same – an over-optimistic view of the capacity of the human subject to shape her life freely and in accordance with the dictates of reason. It is just this conception of the subject as standing, in principle, outside the social practices and discourses in which she participates that poststructuralism follows structuralism in resisting. But whereas structuralism, as we saw in the case of Althusser, substitutes for such a transcendental subject a totally socially determined one, poststructuralism undercuts the status of social structures to do such determining work, leaving a subjectivity characterisable neither in the universal terms of Enlightenment metaphysics nor the local and particular ones of cultural embeddedness. The figure who has, perhaps, given most thought to the implications of this conception of subjectivity for a politics of identity is the Bulgarian francophone feminist and poststructuralist, Julia Kristeva. Kristeva initially trained as a psychoanalyst:‘the ethics of psychoanalysis’, she remarks, ‘implies a politics: it would involve a cosmopolitanism of a new sort that, cutting across governments, economies and markets, might work for a mankind whose solidarity is founded on the consciousness of its unconscious’.43 Postmodern thinking about identity, like Homi Bhabha’s, has been greatly influenced by Freud’s account of the development of the child’s conception of himself as a separate entity. In particular it has been influenced by the interpretation placed upon this account by Jacques Lacan, for whom ‘the unconscious is structured like language’,44 rather than viewing it, like Freud himself, as a biological mechanism. We do not need to expound Freud’s account to bring out some of the key features of Lacan’s reading of it. First, the subject lacks any prior identity: the identity she gains has to be established by a process of identification. Second, the individual gains her identity only by contrast with that of the other (of, in the first instance, the parent, on the Freudian account). In the drawing of this contrast, furthermore, negative emotions of hostility and jealousy towards the other are implicated. Third, however, in Hegelian vein, the dependence of the individual’s identity upon this contrast – this alterity within the self, as it is metaphorically expressed – implies a lack of self-sufficiency, stability and security in identity. The maintenance of identity is therefore a process perpetually focused upon uneasy 140


transactions with those who are other than oneself. Next, recognition of identity involves identification with images of the self – in the first instance, on Lacan’s account, with one’s mirror image. This is bound up with positive emotions of a narcissistic character. Lastly, this selfidentification involves taking up a subject position in a pre-existing system of relationships, in the first instance family ones, which constitutes an entry into the symbolic order. For identity is gained only through acquiring the language within which it is constituted. Kristeva utilises this apparatus to give an account of the formation of our group identities and the attitudes to those outside the group which is implicated in them: Freud has demonstrated to what extent a conglomeration of men and women into sets is oppressive and death bearing. ‘Society is founded on a common crime’ he wrote in Totem and Taboo, and the exclusion of ‘others’ which binds the identity of a clan, a sect, a party, or a nation, is equally the source of the pleasure of identification (‘this is what we are, therefore it is what I am’) and of barbaric persecution (‘that is foreign to me, therefore I throw it out, hunt it down, or massacre it’).45 What I ‘throw out’ in the identification which establishes my identity – what, in Kristeva’s terminology, I abject – is that which characterises those I count as strangers. But – and this is where the psychoanalytic turn is crucial to Kristeva’s thinking – what I throw out in gaining my identity in the symbolic order is, prior to that, a part of me, and, at the level of the unconscious, it remains so. ‘The foreigner’, as she puts it, ‘is within me, hence we are all foreigners. If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners’.46 What are the implications of this realisation? Kristeva insists that ‘we cannot suppress the symptom that the foreigner provokes’.47 And this makes cosmopolitanism of the classical variety impossible.There is no way of transcending the particular moral codes which we acquire in gaining our identities and distinguishing ourselves from others.Yet once the mechanics of this are realised, the need to design systems that allow us to live together with others who are and must remain different will be recognised. Change in social relations is possible precisely because we are not as subjects fully determined by our place in the symbolic order – in discourse and in rule-governed social behaviour. For the abjection necessary to gaining an identity in that order occurs within the self – so that the subject can change and, in its 141


changing, changes in the symbolic order are effected, though presently unpredictable. Kristeva’s work constitutes an interesting attempt to combine the intuitions that give rise on the one hand to cosmopolitanism – that cultural and national identity should not matter politically – and on the other to conservatism – that inevitably they will. Her account may be viewed as providing a general schema for describing collective identities which enables us to understand their psychic dynamics and the sorts of conflicts or accommodations they provoke. Arguably it should not be seen, by contrast, as seeking to explain nationalist movements, for example, in terms of their psychological causation. This said, however, the political implications of Kristeva’s account threaten to dissolve into either a politically unspecific utopianism or a troubling illiberalism.Yet whether or not one wishes to follow Kristeva’s psychoanalytic account of group identities, these dual streams in her political thought are those along which, arguably, any postmodernist theory must be led. On the one hand it must doubt the availability within the resources inherited from the Enlightenment for arriving at a general set of political prescriptions for accommodating group differences. On the other it must concede the political salience of such differences. For even if there is no adequate social basis for them they do have inescapable social consequences which need to be accommodated. How might they be? Kristeva’s own approach in effect refashions a characteristically French republicanism to allow for greater cultural diversity. Such diversity is to be appreciated as revealing secretly attractive parts of ourselves, and can be expressed in aesthetic productions which alter the images of nationality with which we are identified. But this is specifically a vision for France and it is not clear how far Kristeva would wish to generalise it to other cases: indeed, within a postmodernist framework it is not clear that she should. Nor is this obviously a bad thing;48 for what may illuminate the French situation by drawing on ideas within the French tradition may simply have no sensible application outside of it. The difficulty rather is that these ideas gain their force from their place in an Enlightenment world-view retained in France. A pessimistic rejoinder49 to Kristeva would be that with the collapse of this as a universal world-view, group identification falls back upon the ethnic nationalisms that Kristeva so much deprecates, and to which she – and perhaps postmodernism generally – provides no cogent answer. 142


NOTES 1. K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto [1848] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 78–80. 2. Marx, Capital [1867–93] (London: Dent, 1930), p. 630. 3. K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, in L. S. Feuer (ed.), Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 254–5. 4. See D. McLellan (ed.), Marx’s Grundrisse (London: Paladin, 1973), p. 142. 5. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 121. 6. Ibid. p. 102. 7. Quoted in M. Guibernau, Nationalisms (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), p. 16. 8. See G.W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, tr.William Wallace (Oxford: OUP, 1971), p. 279. 9. Quoted in H. B. Davis, Nationalism and Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), p. 61. 10. The usage derives from Kautsky: see H. B. Davis, Towards a Marxist Theory of Nationalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), p. 6. 11. See V. I. Lenin, ‘Self-determination’ in his Questions of National Policy and Proletarian Internationalism (Moscow: Progress, 1970). 12. E. Balibar and I. Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class (London:Verso, 1991), p. 82. 13. Feuer, Marx and Engels, p. 247. 14. Preface to Critique of Political Economy in T. B. Bottomore and M. Rubel (eds), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 68. 15. It is not clear that Gramsci drew this conclusion in his unsystematically presented body of thought: see Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (eds and tr.), Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971). 16. S. Hall,‘Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity’, Journal of Communication Inquiry 20 (1980), p. 9. Gramsci’s approach to nationalism is discussed by Ephraim Nimni, Marxism and Nationalism (London: Pluto, 1991), ch. 4. 17. Althusser, For Marx (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 233. 18. Cp. R. Miliband, Marxism and Politics (Oxford: OUP, 1977), pp. 54–5. 19. Quoted in A. Callinicos, Althusser’s Marxism (London: Pluto, 1976), p. 67. 20. E. Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of our Times (London: Verso, 1990), p. 210. 21. Ibid. p. 211. 22. M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), p. 97. 23. Ibid. p. 93. 24. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (London: Allen Lane, 1979), pp. 93–4. 25. M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Allen Lane, 1977), p. 194. 26. See D.T. Goldberg, Racist Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), ch. 3. 27. E. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. 8, 12.

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28. For example D. Potter, ‘Orientalism and its problems’, in P.Williams and C. Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1993). 29. M. Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 48. 30. E. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (London: Faber, 1984), p. 246. 31. E. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London:Vintage, 1994). See esp. ch. 3. 32. See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993), ch. 1. 33. G. Spivak, Outside the Teaching Machine (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 60. 34. See G. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern speak?’ in Williams and Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. 35. H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 111. 36. Ibid. p. 44. 37. Ibid. p. 110. 38. Indeed Bhabha can be viewed as inferring from Naipaul’s novels the possibility of mimicry as resistance, while Naipaul the theorist could only see resistance as mimicking the West. See R. Nixon, London Calling (New York: OUP, 1992), ch. 6. 39. H. Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 112. 40. Ibid. pp. 145, 148. 41. See H. Bhabha, ‘Cultures in-between’, in S. Hall and P. de Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996). 42. A. Ahmad, ‘The politics of literary post-coloniality’, in P. Mongia (ed.), Contemporary Post-Colonial Theory (London: Arnold, 1996), pp. 286, 290. 43. J. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia UP, 1991), p. 192. 44. J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis [1973] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 20. 45. J. Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism (New York: Columbia UP, 1993), p. 50. 46. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, pp. 192, 191. (Perhaps Kristeva is a primordialist here: see ch. 1 above.) 47. Ibid. p. 191. 48. Pace Anthony Smith who complains that postmodernism refuses to espouse general theoretical conclusions, in his Nationalism and Modernism (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 218–20. 49. Cp. Z. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), ch. 8.

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PART III

qw Issues


7 CITIZENSHIP, IMMIGRATION AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

qw

MEMBERSHIP OF THE STATE

Who is entitled to citizenship of a given state? How, if at all, does a person’s being one of a certain people – in any of the senses we have looked at – affect their entitlement? There are two kinds of question here. One is the legal question of what formal conditions for citizenship a given state imposes, and this will vary from state to state. The other is the philosophical question of what such conditions ought to be, that is to say of who is morally, rather than legally, entitled to citizenship. Prima facie there would seem to be just one sort of answer to the philosophical question, by comparison with which some states’ formal conditions may be justified and others’ unjustified. Closely related to the question of citizenship is a question about immigration: who should be allowed to settle in a given state? For the right to settle is generally taken to confer, eventually for oneself, or for one’s children, the right to become a citizen, since the modern state expects, and, as we shall see, for good reason, that the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants shall be citizens. In what follows, then, we shall often consider attitudes to immigration in order to illuminate views about the proper conditions for citizenship. In order to begin to answer the question of who is entitled to citizenship, we need to consider what is the essential purpose of the 147


state. For to be a citizen is to be a member of the state, so that entitlement to citizenship is entitlement to state membership – that is, to membership of a political organisation that plays a particular role in society. It is commonly held1 that this role comprises two functions – the maintenance of order internally and of security externally. This gives the impression that the borders of a state, and hence the population which is to comprise its membership, are to be fixed by determining what mutually antagonistic peoples there are, to be kept apart for their own safety by incorporation into separate states. Though borders may sometimes be fixed in accordance with these considerations it is evident that there is no principled way of dividing peoples up along these lines and distributing them into states, if only because membership of separate states is at least as potent a source of antagonism as anything prior to it. The impression given by the two-function account of the role of states is, indeed, a highly misleading one.The symmetry that it suggests between internal and external protections of the citizen is an illusion. For it is the maintenance of order within a territory through law enforcement that is the state’s constitutive role. The securing of borders is a function parasitic upon this and necessary only so that there can be a distinct area within which a body of laws can be enforced. Incursions across borders which threaten the lives or property of citizens would, in the ordinary course of events, simply be criminal acts. If they are on a large scale and politically inspired then extraordinary measures must be taken to repel them, and in this the security function of the state is operative. But this is simply to enable the normal processes of law enforcement to be resumed. It follows that the question of where the borders of a state should be drawn depends upon what populations should be governed together under the same body of laws. Indeed this is so even where mutual antagonisms are taken into account in drawing borders; for what this implies is that the antagonistic parties cannot be restrained from depredations upon each other by ordinary legal means. More generally, the question of who should be governed together under the same laws needs to be decided by determining who will voluntarily obey and co-operate in enforcing them. That is to say, by determining who will acknowledge by their actions a political obligation to the same state because it enforces the law across their territory.The question of who is entitled to citizenship of a state can, then, be viewed from two angles: who should acknowledge political obligations to the state? And who should occupy its territory? The answer to the 148

CITIZENSHIP, IMMIGRATION AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

second question must not come apart from that to the first, so that a state cannot reasonably claim territory to which people have a right unless they acknowledge a political obligation to that state. If it does so it will lack legitimacy, for a state lacks legitimacy to the extent to which it must impose its will upon a people by force, rather than through drawing upon their sense of political obligation to it. Indeed the modern state differs from what have been called ‘systems of mastery’2 precisely in that it appeals to such a sense of obligation and thereby makes people members of their political organisation – that is, willing participants, which is what citizens are, rather than mere subjects. What precisely the political obligations acknowledged by those who are properly citizens of a state amount to is not something I shall consider here, except to say that I take it to imply a certain kind of loyalty to the state.3 For it is not just acquiescence in the legal system that the requisite sense of obligation expresses, but endorsement of it as, in a certain sense, one’s own.4 Cosmopolitans may baulk at this last remark. For them, mere occupancy of any state may generate obligations to it no different from those one should acknowledge if one lived in any other. In that case one would have no reason for loyalty to one state rather than to another, and the boundaries between states – if they must exist at all – must exist only for practical reasons having to do with the efficient carving up of administrative areas.5 Admission to citizenship of a state, whether through indigenous occupation or immigration, would be determined on purely utilitarian grounds. Indeed citizenship proper, as the locus of political rights and obligations, would be world citizenship,6 and citizenship of states would be a merely local manifestation of this, as being the citizen of a certain town with its particular bye-laws is in relation to state citizenship.The difficulty here is that it is now hard to see citizenship as a form of membership at all: world citizenship is not this, in any substantive sense, since there is no way for people to be non-members; state citizenship is so only in the most attenuated and formal sense of being assigned a certain administrative designation with particular rules to follow. It must not, according to the cosmopolitan theory, go beyond this. For any special commitment to fellow members or pride in membership would undermine the rights and obligations of world citizenship from which it ultimately derives.And that is a way of saying that the motivation for discharging obligations and honouring rights does not derive from membership at all. We shall look at cosmopolitanism no further, which is not to say that it may not be justified. A verdict on this depends in part on how its competitors 149


stand up to scrutiny, for while cosmopolitanism makes the collective identities that individuals have, beyond their mere humanity, irrelevant to citizenship, other theories regard other identities as relevant, or can be presented as so regarding them. POLITICAL ASSOCIATION

What sort of membership should citizenship be? Michael Walzer has proposed a useful analogy between membership of a state and membership of three other sorts of social entity: neighbourhoods, clubs and families.7 It is convenient to start with clubs, not least because the American case which we shall be using as an example in this chapter comes closest to this model of the state. It was, after all, set up, just as a club might be, by its members establishing a constitution, ‘in order’, as that constitution runs, ‘to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.’8 In these terms the people of the former colonies who agreed to the constitution entered an association, very much as John Locke envisaged that people would ‘join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living, one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any that are not of it.’9 The operative principle here is, of course, the liberal one of freedom of association: people are free to associate politically with whom they choose in order to further their mutual interests through membership of a shared state. The other liberal principle which comes into play here is that people fall under obligations only by virtue of contracting them voluntarily.10 Thus it is their entering into association with others for the purpose of establishing and supporting a state that places them under a political obligation to obey its laws and give it loyalty.The boundaries of the state are fixed, therefore, as we require, by the scope of those who acknowledge this obligation. Yet why does this coincide with the range of those who have a right to occupy the territory those boundaries enclose? Locke’s account ensures that it does. The reason for this lies in the fact that the associates’ purpose includes the ‘secure enjoyment of their properties’ and that the territory bounded comprises just those properties. People have a right to live, for reasons we shall touch on later, where they own property. But they associate together to protect this property and thereby incur political obligations, so that 150


the answers to the two questions into which the question of who should be a citizen dissolves coincide as we require. On this Lockean account it is evident that pre-existing racial, ethnic or cultural identities are seemingly irrelevant to citizenship. All that is needed is the will to engage in the same political project as others with the same interests, of which the protection of certain properties is the paradigm case. It follows that anyone who also undertakes to be part of this project can in principle be admitted to membership, though whether they will be is at the discretion of the original associates. All that is required is that prospective members should be similarly motivated to discharge the required obligations and honour the rights of others. But this motivation, it is assumed, does require that the state, conceived as the product of a particular voluntary political association, is worth supporting. It needs to be thought of as worthwhile not just in delivering what the new entrants want but in virtue of the principles whereby it does so; and this will include its doing so precisely through being a free association and in other respects respecting and safeguarding individual liberties.Attachment to these principles, thought of purely as principles of political organisation and thus, in theory at least, cross-cultural in their appeal, is taken to be required for membership. Once membership is acquired, however, it bestows an identity, a national identity, according to a liberal construction of nationality, as consisting in a certain fixed inclination of the will. For the stability and unity of the state requires fixity in the association in which it originates.The question that needs to be asked is whether this identity is, after all, a cultural one. For if it is then this kind of liberal view of state citizenship, as generating shared nationality through a shared political association, may collapse into another kind of liberal nationalism, namely that which sees nations as associations set up to preserve a common culture. For according to this view, clearly, cultural qualifications on potential members will be imposed. Does entry to the United States, to bring the question down to a concrete case, impose cultural qualifications, contrary to appearances, just by virtue of the fact that it is a country set up along Lockean lines with the liberal principles which this implies? An answer will turn on whether we should regard these principles as characterising a species of Reformation Liberalism which has a potentially universal appeal, or whether they mark out some more culturally limited version of liberalism.Those who drafted the American constitution were in little doubt that they had universal reason on their 151


side: had not the Declaration of Independence declared, as truths that were self-evident, the existence of rights to ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’ and to the institutions of government ‘deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed’?11 Yet even if these truths were self-evident, not everyone could appreciate that fact. The religious toleration implied by the right to liberty, for instance, does not command universal assent.This implies some disqualifications for citizenship on cultural grounds, but it scarcely makes the American national identity arising from citizenship a cultural one, since nothing culturally specific to America is implied. However, whether or not some universalist defence of the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence can be provided, what is fairly clear is that it will not extend to justifying the particular arrangements whereby these are given content in the constitution. But it is the constitution, and not some abstract set of principles, which defines the rights and duties of the citizen. How, then, should assent to the constitution be construed: as manifesting attachment to a particular liberal culture or not? There are at least two possible avenues which would lead to a negative answer. One is that such assent is the outcome of a modus vivendi between people of different cultural or ethnic identities who find in the constitution a set of arrangements that enables them to pursue their various interests under the same state with a minimum of friction. Religious toleration, for example, is accepted for just this reason. Two points should be noticed about this answer. First, although such principles as toleration may commend themselves to people in a wide range of cases where they need to live together peaceably, that they are sustainable in practice depends upon the balance of political forces which is in play at a particular time and place.Thus, if they viewed the constitution as providing a modus vivendi then the so-called ‘Know-Nothings’ and republicans in the America of the 1850s would have been quite justified in their policy of espousing ‘nativism’ and opposing immigration by the Catholic Irish.12 For such immigrants would potentially change that balance of forces and could threaten the modus vivendi.The second point to note, though, is that such a modus vivendi is scarcely a basis for national identity, for the sense of political obligation and loyalty on which it rests is at best contingent and temporary. Nothing more than expediency grounds the unity of the state, so that there is nothing to secure the fixity of will required for shared national identity. John Rawls’ so-called ‘political liberalism’, which we touched upon in Chapter 5, suggests a second avenue to the conclusion that American 152


identity, construed as flowing from Lockean citizenship, might not be a cultural one. Rawls rejects the idea that liberal institutions might be founded on a modus vivendi, and suggests instead that they emerge from what he terms an ‘overlapping consensus’13 between members of different cultural groups. Each group has its own comprehensive view of what is worthwhile in life but they agree upon such principles as toleration since these principles are implied by their differing overall views. We could, Rawls’ theory seems to suggest, regard such a consensus as representing a merely fortuitous intersection of different cultural views which it would be quite wrong to ascribe to any cultural affinity. In the case in question, however, this interpretation would surely be perverse. Even if a belief in toleration can be coherently combined into many different systems of value, the fact that different groups share it in America, for example, is no coincidence, but the result of their exposure to similar cultural influences. In these circumstances it is not unreasonable to regard it as part of a culture which they share, however many other elements of their culture may diverge.14 I conclude, then, that even on a Lockean account of the basis of American national identity, that identity is, perhaps despite appearances, a cultural one. The overlapping consensus account could serve to ground a viable conception of nationality, but a culturally based one, and, what is more, one which would exclude the members of some groups from citizenship on cultural grounds, since their cultures would not provide the resources for them to view as worthwhile the principles of the association that they sought to enter.15 Walzer himself implicitly endorses such a conclusion. For he believes that a political community needs to possess a shared conception of itself which constitutes its national identity. It is to protect this cultural conception that the community must be allowed the right to determine who is to enter by barring those who might undermine it.The American self-conception is that of an ethnically and morally heterogeneous liberal society, but this is itself a feature of American culture, so that it is for this reason, and not for some less culture-specific one, that restricting immigration to white Protestants in the 1920s would have been wrong according to Walzer.16 It is, however, quite unclear that a political community should be accorded the right to refuse membership on this sort of ground. One would allow it only if one believed either that the point of a political community was to sustain a culture or, as Walzer seems to believe, that the pursuit of a common life which a state facilitates requires a shared culture. If culture is taken to be what people conceive of as collecting themselves together into 153


a group with a shared identity, neither view seems convincing. What prospective entrants to a state are seeking is not usually an identity, but the benefits which membership brings to the living of a common life. It is their capacity for the latter which is relevant to membership and the kinds of exclusions which Walzer’s club model authorises go well beyond this. THE FAMILY MODEL

Sharply contrasting with Walzer’s club model of state membership is that provided by the family. ‘The most natural state’, wrote Herder, ‘is one nation, an extended family with one national character,’ and he went on to condemn ‘the wild mixing of various races and nationalities under one sceptre.’17 Citizenship, on this account, should only be extended to people who are members of a certain race, or of an ethnic group or one of a number of closely related ethnic groups. It is certainly not by virtue of their volunteering for it that citizenship is conferred upon them, but in virtue of their qualifying as a result of certain biological and, perhaps, also cultural facts about them – facts which are to all intents and purposes fixed and unchanging.Why should this be? Fundamentally because, on the family model, it is thought that those and only those who satisfy these qualifications will be able to discharge the political obligations of citizenship.The boundaries of the state should, therefore, be drawn around them.There are, however, two rather different ways in which this connection can be explained and we shall look at each in turn. The first is plainly naturalistic, maintaining that the national loyalties which underpin political obligation are natural sentiments just as, it is supposed, loyalties in the family are. In their sociobiological manifestation18 these loyalties are taken to arise from ‘kin altruism’, whereby we privilege those to whom we are genetically related, or those with whom we share a way of life, because such behaviour conduces to the transmission of our genes. In the latter case, of course, it may not do so because those with whom we share a way of life may not be so related to us.Yet since in our evolutionary history they are likely to have been so, such behaviour persists. And this can explain national loyalties naturalistically even in an ethnically mixed country like the USA. Not that such loyalties extend very far beyond one’s own ethnic group. Nor can they be expected to extend to recent immigrants, who will not normally share one’s way of life and who thus imperil the established bonds on which the state depends. 154


This is an updated version of a fairly old set of beliefs, which we looked at in Chapter 1. It appeals to conservatives of the New Right as much as that did to those of the Old. Even in a country like the USA such beliefs have had considerable influence. Despite the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the constitution (1865–6) which bestowed citizens’ rights irrespective of ‘race and colour’19 immigration policies targeted groups for exclusion or limitation on racial or ethnic grounds.The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, for example, was followed by various Acts barring other Asians and privileging immigrants from northern and western Europe. Sponsoring a 1924 Act, Albert Johnson explained that ‘the United States is our land. If it was not the land of our fathers, at least it may be, and it should be the land of our children.’20 His thought was that even if the state started as a voluntary association of settlers its continuance required the ethnic homogeneity that only severe restrictions on new immigrants could bring. Such thoughts are seldom far from the minds of those on the political Right. How, though, does the naturalist picture ensure that the scope of motivated political obligations will coincide with rights of territorial occupation? This is not a question the account can easily answer. Ethologists21 have claimed that ‘biological’ nations, conceived of as extended kinship groups of human or other animals, are marked out by the territory they defend. Yet while this makes some connection between territory and the nexus of obligation it is not the right one. For the territory that is defended is not thereby the territory that is rightfully occupied. The point is especially pertinent in view of the fact that ethnically defined nations have a particular propensity for driving out others not of their kind.The rights that are claimed here are to ethnically ‘pure’ territory as the basis for cohesive statehood.This is, perhaps, no less credible than the other implausible presumptions on which the naturalist picture depends.Whatever its failings, the continued existence of the United States as a single stable polity gives the lie to the picture. Different racial or ethnic groups can have shared political loyalties and there is no need for contrived evolutionary accounts to explain this. The reasons for supposing otherwise are always political, never convincingly scientific, not least because the effects of people’s racial beliefs can never be discounted, in favour of some supposedly more natural dispositions. The second way to take the family model is quite different. It is to view the family as paradigmatic of community. According to this communitarian account, it is not the supposed naturalness of certain 155


sentiments that is taken to explain the motivation for discharging political obligations to a state bounded in a certain way, but the givenness of one’s membership of a nation, analogous to that of one’s membership of the family. In the family my membership is, according to this story, unchosen and involuntary, either through birth or through sexual ties that are themselves unwilled and passional. My obligations within it stem from relationships in which I find myself, not from ones I enter for a reason; and I discharge these obligations disinterestedly, not because I discern a benefit in undertaking them. They are essentially obligations to ensure the contentment and welfare of a particular range of people, and as such are fairly open-ended and unspecific.This conception of family life shapes a certain communitarian view of the nation that is particularly congenial to ethnic nationalists. As in the family, membership is acquired by birth or marriage, or perhaps by other modes of assimilation which have the same effect in generating unreflective loyalties. The boundaries of the nation are fixed by the range of those who share such loyalties. Images of the family like this are often taken to be an inescapable component of nationalism,22 yet this is to miss the specificity of their effects on particular accounts. David Miller’s account of nationhood, for instance, is far removed from conservative ones that espouse naturalism, and Miller is at pains to distinguish it from those that locate shared nationhood in a common ethnicity.Yet he adopts23 the family as a model of what a socialist national community might be like, and he does so precisely to defend the welfare state which is thought, on the Left, to be implied by the formal equality of citizenship.24 For the welfare state is threatened by a polarisation between highly paid professionals and low-paid workers induced by global markets. ‘In the absence of national solidarity,’ comments Miller, ‘political leaders will have neither the means nor the incentives to counteract this polarisation.’25 The origin of this solidarity lies in the concern which members of a nation simply do have for their compatriots and not for others. For, and here Miller quotes David Hume, ‘the generosity of men is very limited, and . . . it seldom extends beyond their friends and family, or, at most, beyond their native country.’26 But ‘nations . . . tend to think of themselves as extended families’,27 so that we just do have such concerns, limited in the national case, as in the familial one. Without them, the obligations on which a welfare state depends could not realistically be imposed by government. Miller is, I have said, anxious to avoid putting a naturalistic gloss on these facts. He views the nation, along social constructionist lines, as a 156


certain type of group constituted by its members recognising each other as compatriots and acknowledging the mutual obligations which membership brings.There is a tension, though, between Miller’s stress on the alleged givenness of national membership, which is what generates national loyalties, and his view that the communal relationships it involves are worthwhile ones, just like relationships within the family. For if they are worthwhile why can we not enter into them for this reason, irrespective of facts about our birth? As we saw in Chapter 5, Miller rejects this possibility as implying what he dubs the ‘lifeboat model’ of national community, in which I am simply thrown together with others and see the value of sticking together to make a collective response. But the mutual obligations of members of the nation, he claims, arise not ‘from the present fact of their co-operation’, but from their ‘historical identity’ stemming from the relationships in which they are born and raised.28 This, as we noted, has conservative consequences, for since cooperation springs from national identity and not vice versa, immigration can cause problems unless ‘immigrants come to share in a common national identity’29 – a process which, because he construes national identity as a kind of cultural identity, Miller likens to marrying into a family and acquiring its culture.30 It is, furthermore, hard to see how this account ensures a coincidence between those who share the same political obligations and the rightful occupants of a territory. For if one finds oneself living cheek by jowl with those who simply do not evince a sentiment of solidarity towards one, it provides no account either of why they should evince it or of why, if they do not, their occupation is not thereby rightful. I conclude that even this communitarian version of the family model fails to provide a satisfactory account of the relations between collective identity and citizenship. RESIDENCE

The family model of state membership is a deeply unattractive one, even though, as we should not forget, the principal method of admission to citizenship on any account is through being born the child of parents who are already citizens. This fact alone does nothing to recommend the family model. For to be born and brought up in a family also implies the continuity of interests with others in it, perhaps including property interests, which creates the presumption of one’s wanting to be part of the same political association with them – to be, that is, a member of the same club. It has also normally implied a 157


common or contiguous residence, even if this can now be less often relied upon. It is this fact of shared occupation of the same area that suggests Walzer’s neighbourhood model of state membership.31 On this model, admission to citizenship of a state should depend simply upon residence in its territories rather than upon any other factors, even if residence itself may have to be controlled. But if it is controlled, this will need to be argued for in relation to the problems new arrivals might cause existing residents, and the entry requirements imposed must be only those relevant to the candidates’ qualifications as potential residents. It is not a necessary feature of the neighbourhood model that entry should be completely unrestricted, though this is how Walzer himself presents it, and this feature provides, in fact, his reason for opposing it as a possible model for citizenship of the state. For Walzer argues that ‘neighbourhoods can be open only if countries are at least potentially closed’.32 He thinks this because, as we noticed earlier in this chapter, he holds that common life requires a shared culture for which closure of the community must be ensured. The common life of a neighbourhood presupposes, then, a shared culture, but a culture whose distinctiveness and stability is ensured at a different level, namely at the level of the state. This argument for the unsatisfactoriness of a neighbourhood model depends, then, precisely upon views about the relationship between culture and political community which we called into question earlier. We questioned them because they implied restrictions on entry that imposed conditions other than those of the prospective entrants’ qualifications as potential residents, which I am arguing, are the only ones that a neighbourhood model can properly require. Entry policies of this sort are, it will be observed, those that have for the most part characterised the United States. They derive, I shall suggest, from its republican tradition of citizenship. For, as we noted in Chapter 5, the basis of republican citizenship is residence in the same place. It is easy to see how, according to this view, entitlement to citizenship of the republic extends to those who occupy its territory. For those who depend for their livelihoods upon a land and a place have a prima facie claim to continued occupation, so that those who actually occupy and work in it will normally do so rightfully and therefore be entitled to citizenship. Common occupation also gives rise, according to the republican theory, to an awareness of the common good, and it is this awareness which actuates citizens in the performance 158


of their political obligations, since these are the obligations of members to work together for the common good, pre-eminent among them being the obligation to obey and enforce the laws that make this possible. Those who rightfully occupy the territory of the republic will coincide with those who acknowledge a political obligation to it. Republicanism thus overcomes the hurdle at which ethnic or cultural communitarian accounts of entitlement to citizenship fall down, and it does so without appeal to the interests of proprietors upon which Lockean liberalism depends. For all its origins in the latter theory, it may be that American citizenship should be viewed as aiming at these republican ideals. If this is so, then some features of American immigration and citizenship policy stand in need of reform. For a century Mexicans have been drawn into the economy of states like California and Texas, latterly in the face of increasingly stringent precautions by the immigration authorities and of obstacles placed in the way of immigrants obtaining citizenship rights. But from a republican standpoint, if Mexicans are required – as seems to be the case – to sustain the economy of the region, then such restrictions on their entry are unjustified. From the beginning, however, the complaint about Mexican immigrants has been the same: that ‘their most unfavourable characteristic is their inclination to form colonies and live in a clannish manner’.33 The Mexicans do not, that is to say, assimilate, retaining in particular their Spanish language, which is predicted to overtake English as the majority tongue in California. This, it is supposed, represents a threat to the very sense of shared community on which republican citizenship depends. Does that imply, for all its pretensions to the contrary, that republican states must in practice impose cultural tests upon prospective entrants? I do not see that it does. There is of course a danger in the ethnic identifications of groups proving so strong and comprehensive as to subvert the promise of republican community. Thus in the 1960s a movement for Chicano nationalism arose among Mexican Americans, following disillusionment at their failure to gain civil rights and an end to discrimination.34 In this case, as in many others, ethnic identification was a reaction to an insufficiently republican response to their situation. This is not to say that there is necessarily a republican response sufficient to avert such dangers in all circumstances. It is to say that there is, so far, nothing inherently inadequate in a republican approach to citizenship.What such an approach must not do is to impose any but 159


the most minimal cultural tests upon otherwise suitable citizens. If it is discriminatory in this way then this is likely to produce just the effects that such tests are intended to avert, by heightening a sense of ethnic and cultural identification among citizens. What, though, of values? Does not republicanism presuppose a shared conception of what constitutes the common good, which must necessarily draw on substantive conceptions that not all cultures share? This would expose it to the same difficulty encountered by the political liberalism that roots political values in an overlapping consensus, namely that the exclusion of those whose cultures do not include such values becomes justified.This would give the lie to the pretensions of republicanism if it were so. Again, however, I do not think that it is. The values that shape the policies of the republic are, ideally, ones that have developed from exchanges between citizens who may have very different cultural backgrounds. They are the product of such exchanges, potentially effecting alterations in the citizens’ prior cultural norms, which is a very different thing from their being the discovered intersection of unchanging ones. Thus, in principle, new members from any cultural background are welcome in the republic, just so long as they are prepared to engage in this process of exchange and decision-making. If it is objected that to require such preparedness itself makes cultural demands there are, I think, two possible responses. One is to stress that the republic is not an association and no formal requirement is demanded.35 Whether new members can fulfil the informal requirement is not something that can be determined in advance, for it can never be determined in advance of the facts whether a republican politics can be successful.This leads to the second response. Only an over-rigid view of culture would lead one to suppose that there are predictable limits on what is possible for people from one culture by way of accommodation to people from another. Republican politics depend upon the falsity of such a view. Republican citizenship generates a form of national identity which is, because of the political values that the republic develops and nurtures, not unfairly thought of as a cultural one, but one which I have argued, places no antecedent cultural restrictions upon membership. In many ways this provides an attractive model for citizenship of states generally, and perhaps it is an ideal that we should work towards. But it is not, for reasons which we shall come to in a moment, clear that the conditions for republican citizenship, and the shared nationality it can generate, always exist, even when people rightfully share a territory. 160


INDIGENOUS RIGHTS

Republicanism presupposes that a territory can be marked out in such a way that there is a common good which all those occupying it can aim to achieve, and this in turn presupposes a range of economic interdependencies. Furthermore, those related by these interdependencies must be able to appreciate how each is in some way needed by others.The interdependencies cannot, that is to say, be simply exploitative, however unequal they may be. If they are exploitative, or if no such interdependencies exist, then there will be no common good to be pursued by all, only a number of separate sectional goods. Consider, for example, the situation of the American colonists vis à vis the indigenous peoples of America. While relationships of mutual dependence might perhaps have developed, based on trade between hunters and agriculturalists, the settlers’ land hunger resulted in either separation or exploitation. In these circumstances there was no possibility of the republican ideal being pursued together by native Americans and European settlers. Instead the native Americans suffered terrible injustices which were only curtailed, to some extent, by Franklin Roosevelt’s Indian Reorganisation Act of 1934.36 An important question to be addressed is how such injustice might now be rectified.37 This is not the question we are tackling here. Rather, we ask, what sort of shared citizenship is possible in a state where this sort of separation of societies exists, whether as a precaution by the oppressed against further exploitation and extinction or for some other reason? First, though, we need to look briefly at the radical objection that the descendants of the settlers have no right to occupy American territory at all, so that it is they who lack entitlement to citizenship of any state founded in it: only the indigenous peoples have that. The objection depends upon the idea that ‘the inhabitants of any country, who are descended and derive a title to their estates from those who are subdued, and had a government forced upon them against their free consents, retain a right to the possessions of their ancestors.’38 This is John Locke, who did not, however, extend the principle to native Americans. Indeed, as Kymlicka notes,39 it could not in practice be applied without creating further great injustices. The principle presupposes that the rights of indigenous peoples stem originally from the fact of residence and this fact itself creates a presumption of rightful occupation even when occupation derives from unjust possession in the past.The settlers, however, did not regard their possession of land in America as unjust and Locke provided the rationale for it. It was 161


based, he maintained,40 upon their establishing property rights by enclosing and cultivating land previously left wild, as it had been by the native Americans. John Winthrop, the Governor of New England in the early seventeenth century, had anticipated Locke: That which is common to all is proper to none. This savage people ruleth over many lands without title or property; for they enclose no ground, neither have they cattle to maintain it, but remove their dwellings as they have occasion.41 The assumption is that property is sufficient for rightful occupation, and that where the settlers establish property claims they thereby gain rights of occupation in that territory which would make them citizens of its state. Locke’s account rested, like Winthrop’s, on a quite false view of the American land in which the native Americans procured their livelihoods. It was not, as he took it to be, a terra nullius – a no-man’s land – but a land already divided up between indigenous groups with their own modes of governance, including rules regulating its possession and use.42 This fact was recognised by others, who accepted that occupation of native American lands could only properly be obtained by treaty. This, indeed, became the position of the British Crown, George III issuing a proclamation in 1763 which forbade taking possession of native hunting grounds except through arrangements negotiated between the Crown and ‘the several Nations or Tribes of Indians’.43 The Proclamation was not, however, to the taste of the settlers. Indeed, it proved to be one of the occasions of the Declaration of Independence. Independence was followed by campaigns against the native Americans which were ordered by George Washington – a singularly inauspicious start to the republic. As James Tully has observed,44 the settlement of native American land without due process was not only materially but culturally oppressive, since it privileged European conceptions of property over quite different collectivist conceptions in which ‘the land itself is not a chattel’, as a spokesman for the Five Civilised Tribes explained in opposing the Indian Allotment Act of 1881.45 Treaty arrangements, by contrast, evince respect not only for indigenous occupants, but for the customs through which they hold the land and organise their affairs generally. Tully regards such arrangements as providing a constitutional model for the place of aboriginal and other analogous groups of ‘culturally diverse citizens’.46 This model implies, first, mutual recognition of such groups as equal and self-regulating; second, their consent, though this 162


is exercised communally rather than individually; and, third, the continuity of their ways of life as a reflection of what they themselves have chosen. Adherence to these three constitutional conventions makes possible a form of modus vivendi to which the parties are pre-existing political formations, rather than individuals, and in which there is no assumption of the rights of one to impose their terms of association over others. Tully’s ‘contemporary constitutionalism’, as he calls it, provides an instructive answer to our question concerning the kind of shared citizenship that might exist when groups of citizens cannot discern an overall common good to aim for, but nonetheless must, by the fact of their shared occupation of a territory, either live side by side peaceably or become embroiled in inter-communal hostility and violence. The avoidance of conflict is the minimal reason for their coming together under the same state. It is less clear, however, that they do come together in the same nation, though Tully himself believes they may achieve such a shared identity.The reason for scepticism is surely this: their political obligations to the state are not direct, but are mediated by loyalty to their group, which is a constituent part of it. Tully may well be right that ‘mutual recognition of the cultures of citizens engenders allegiance and unity. . . no matter how diverse or confederal it is’,47 by contrast with policies of assimilation or integration. But it is an allegiance derivative upon the state’s role in nurturing one’s group, to which one’s primary loyalty is due. It is hard to see this derivative allegiance as generating an identity over and above the formal status of citizen. This point is connected with another that concerns the character of the groups entering into arrangements of contemporary constitutionalism. It is easy to see how cultural communities like the native American tribes can enter them in virtue of their corporate and selfgoverning structures. It is far less easy to see how the form of citizenship that characterises contemporary constitutionalism can apply to groups not so structured or even to collectivities that do not, properly speaking, form groups at all, such as those that Tully calls ‘inter-cultural citizens’48 with hybrid cultural identities. Of course, as Tully wishes to stress, the three conventions can be applied in the state’s dealings with them so as to avoid cultural discrimination and so forth. But this is further than he seems to recognise from their being placed in relations to the state analogous to those of the indigenous peoples who enter it through treaty. For it is not clear that the political allegiance of inter-cultural citizens depends upon prior loyalties as do indigenous 163


peoples’ allegiances. Prior loyalties such as these are what make forms of autonomy for cultural communities possible and often desirable. It is quite obscure how self-government could be offered in any form to the hybrid cultural formations that make up the cultural diversity of most contemporary states. It is important not to confuse enjoying such autonomy with being allocated specific representation in the government of the state.49 States constituted through treaty relations between pre-existing political communities often have the form of federations, though not all federations (the United States itself is an example) are constituted out of such separate communities; and federations are one way in which group representation can be effected under suitable conditions of territorial compactness.50 In other circumstances group representation can be achieved through consociational systems in which territorially commingled groups are allocated specific representation in government and even rights of veto over matters that peculiarly affect them.51 All these, and others, are ways of affording representation to ethnic groups or cultural formations, so that citizenship is conceived of as mediated by membership of them and the identities they provide. This is a model associated particularly with the work of Iris Marion Young,52 which we shall look at in more detail in the following chapter when discussing responses to multiculturalism more generally. Yet it is, with the sort of exceptions we have been looking at in this section, a deeply problematic model if we think of modern identities as fragmented and hybridised. For it seems to presuppose a discoverable and general order in the priority of identities which this last thought undermines. Citizenship may, it might turn out, simply be sui generis, an identity neither dependent upon others nor giving rise to them; and how it should be allocated may bear no principled relation to other identities, past or prospective. These may, in particular cases, need to be taken account of, but for pragmatic reasons. And for pragmatic reasons citizenship may need to be fought for, or to be disavowed. But there may be little reason to think that the question of entitlement to citizenship, or what forms such citizenship should take, admits of any general answer. NOTES 1. For example D. D. Raphael, Problems of Political Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 32–4. 2. J. Hampton, Political Philosophy (Boulder:Westview, 1997), pp. 121–2. 3. Pace S. Caney,‘Individuals, nations and obligations’, in S. Caney, D. George

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4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

and P. Jones (eds), National Rights, International Obligations (Boulder: Westview, 1996), pp. 119–21. Cp. Hampton, Political Philosophy, p. 96. Cp. R. E. Goodin, ‘What is so special about our fellow countrymen?’, Ethics 98 (1987–8), pp. 663–86. For a defence of this proposition, see N. Dower, World Ethics: The New Agenda (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1998). M.Walzer,‘Membership’, in his Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic, 1983); also in S. Avineri and A. de-Shalit (eds), Communitarianism and Individualism (Oxford: OUP, 1992). ‘Constitution of the United States of America’, reprinted in C. Chesterton, A History of the United States (London: Dent, 1940), p. 301. J. Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government [1689–90], § 95. See H. Beran, The Consent Theory of Political Obligation (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1987), esp. pp. 50–3. Quoted in Chesterton, History of the United States, p. 297. See H. Brogan, The Longman History of the United States of America (London: Longman, 1985), pp. 312–13. See also M.Walzer, What Does it Mean to be an American? (New York: Marsilio, 1992), pp. 31–3. J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia UP, 1996), lecture IV. To suppose otherwise may be due to a functionalist view of culture: see Chapter 2 above. This is David Miller’s conclusion in ‘Citizenship and Pluralism’, Political Studies 43 (1995), pp. 432–50. See Walzer, Spheres of Justice, p. 40. F. M. Barnard (ed.), J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture (Cambridge: CUP, 1969), p. 324. See for example P. van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon (Oxford: Elsevier, 1981). Quoted in Chesterton, History of the United States, pp. 317–19. Quoted in Brogan, Longman History of the United States, p. 512. See also R. Grillo, Pluralism and the Politics of Difference (Oxford: OUP, 1998), ch. 7. For example Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative (London: Collins, 1967), ch. 6. See for example B. Parekh, ‘Ethnocentricity of the nationalist discourse’, Nations and Nationalism I (1995), pp. 25–52. D. Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: OUP, 1995). See esp. pp. 49–58. In ‘Citizenship and Pluralism’, however, he adopts a different picture. The locus classicus is T. H. Marshall, ‘Citizenship and social class’, in R. E. Goodin and P. Pettit (eds), Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). D. Miller, ‘Nationality: Some replies’, Journal of Applied Philosophy 14 (1997), p. 70. Quoted in Miller, On Nationality, p. 58, fn. 11. Ibid. p. 121. Ibid. pp. 41–2. Ibid. p. 76.

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30. Miller, ‘Nationality: Some replies’, p. 78. 31. Walzer assumes that neighbourhoods are a type of association, but he seems to be using the latter notion in a less specific sense than when he views clubs as such. Neighbourhoods certainly lack the specific purposes of associations proper. 32. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, p. 38. 33. See S. Bryan, ‘Mexican Immigrants in the United States’ [1912], in W. Moquin and C. V. Doren (eds), A Documentary History of the Mexican American (New York: Bantam, 1971), p. 337. 34. See ibid. pp. 488–93. 35. Except, usually, the renunciation of other citizenships: see Hampton, Political Philosophy, pp. 229–30. 36. See Brogan, Longman History of the United States, p. 557. 37. See J.Waldron,‘Superseding historic injustice’, Ethics 103 (1992), pp. 4–28. 38. Locke, Second Treatise, § 192. 39. W. Kymklicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: OUP, 1995), pp. 219–21, note 5. 40. Locke, Second Treatise, ch. 5. 41. Quoted in Brogan, Longman History of the United States, p. 60. 42. For detailed discussion, see James Tully,‘Aboriginal property and Western theory: Recovering a middle ground’, Social Philosophy and Policy 11 (1994), pp.153–80. 43. A. B. Keith (ed.), Selected Speeches and Documents on British Colonial Policy 1763–1917, vol. 1 (London: OUP, 1918), pp. 3–11. 44. See Tully,‘Aboriginal property’ and Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), ch. 3. 45. Quoted in Brogan, Longman History of the United States, p. 65. 46. Tully, Strange Multiplicity, p. 183. 47. Ibid. pp. 197–8. 48. Ibid. pp. 53–6, 176–8. 49. Cp. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. 142–4. 50. For a discussion of this approach, see W. Kymlicka, ‘Is federation a viable alternative to secession?’ in P. Lehning (ed.), Theories of Secession (London: Routledge, 1998). 51. See Arend Lijphart,‘Self-determination versus pre-determination of ethnic minorities in power sharing systems’, in W. Kymlicka (ed.), The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: OUP, 1995). 52. In this connection see particularly I. M.Young, ‘Polity and group difference: A critique of the ideal of universal citizenship’, Ethics 99 (1989), pp. 250–74, and ‘Defining group representation’, Nomos 39 (1997), pp. 349–76.

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8 MULTICULTURALISM

qw

CULTURAL RIGHTS

How can people of different cultures live together in the same state? This is the question that theorists have in mind when they debate the nature of and prospects for multiculturalism.There is, of course, a presumption that there is a problem here – a presumption that springs from the idea that the, in some sense, normal condition of people is to share a culture if they share a state. This idea is hard to defend if the sense in question is that of statistical normality, for the modern state, as is frequently observed,1 does not arise from conditions of cultural homogeneity – it creates them.The supposition that things are otherwise is largely due to the functionalist theory of culture, with its German Romantic origins, which we criticised in Chapter 2.And yet, it will be objected, manifestly there are problems of cultural co-existence under the same polity, arising, on the one hand, from the need for citizens to be able to communicate together, which their use of different languages may hamper, and, on the other, from their need to live under the same laws, which different values may make it hard to accommodate. That there may be such problems can be accepted, and these two dimensions of culture – language and values – will be kept in mind in what follows as factors that may need to be addressed in the political arrangements made for particular circumstances. But no general conclusions about the problematic character of combining cultures in the 167


same polity can be drawn. It is, we should notice, with the character of such arrangements that we shall be concerned; the question for political philosophers is what are the best sorts of arrangement that can be made for accommodating cultural diversity, where by ‘the best’ we mean those arrangements that can be justified in terms of the principles we apply to judging political arrangements – in terms, that is to say, of their capacity to produce justice, freedom, concord and, indeed, the overall good of those concerned. Not only, then, might we expect it to be controversial whether one set of arrangements is better able than another to deliver certain goods in conditions of cultural diversity, but also whether one sort of good should take precedence over another. On the latter question different philosophical theories will deliver different answers which affect the arrangements for diversity they suggest. It is not, of course, the task of the philosopher to assess the practical consequences of the arrangements suggested for some actual political situation, which will depend upon many empirical factors. Ethically desirable ways of dealing with diversity may founder on the rocks of antagonism and prejudice, while apparently undesirable ones may, thanks to goodwill and mutual accommodation, prosper. Yet lessons can sometimes be drawn from actual situations about the theories which have been applied in them. We can see some scale of political values in operation, and question whether, if this is the way it works in practice, we wish to continue to endorse it, as we did in mere reflection. Nor is it enough always to protest that in more propitious circumstances the previously preferred scale would be best; and this for two reasons. First, political philosophy cannot be utopian: it must take account, in general terms, of the interests and power relations which political arrangements foster. Second, political theories must eventually find their test in practice: political values have to be lived with, not contemplated only. It would, however, be rash to conclude from the break-up of the Soviet Union, for example, that its policies for dealing with the culturally diverse peoples that made it up, and the theories on which those policies were based, were fatally flawed. Many other factors were in play.Yet still, I shall suggest, there are lessons to be learnt from it if we compare these policies with those that other theories generate and consider their upshots. Soviet policies were shaped in response to the fact that after the 1917 revolution the Bolsheviks inherited from the Tsars a multicultural empire with a wide variety of ways of life, histories, languages and religions.2 The Bolsheviks conceptualised this 168

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diversity in a way broadly similar to that propounded by Kymlicka, distinguishing cultural groups in terms of shared language and history, rather than in terms of values, which were thought of as more mutable. Indeed, cultural distinctions were discerned among the peoples of Soviet Central Asia precisely to counter their own self-identifications in terms of the shared values manifest in common Islamic beliefs or small-scale tribal loyalties.3 For these identities were thought to stand in the way of an eventual coming together of Soviet cultural groups in a shared class solidarity. Cultural groupings of this sort were thought of as nationalities (though only the larger ones with their own compact territories as nations4), and each individual was assigned to one of them, so that membership of the Soviet state was mediated by a recognised cultural identity.This is an important feature of Soviet constitutional arrangements which distinguishes them from those of most liberal democracies. What rights, however, did nationality confer? We can distinguish five types of putative cultural right that are relevant here: to cultural expression, to cultural protection, to cultural control, to cultural representation and to cultural recognition. Cultural expression in such matters as language use – though not, as might be expected from the concept of culture employed, in ethical or religious practice – was, broadly speaking, conceded – at least in the early days of the Soviet Union. So too was a degree of cultural protection through the provision of culturally specific education and state funding for a culture’s artistic activities. Cultural protection did not in general extend, however, to external restraints on members of other cultures,5 preventing them from endangering those in a precarious position, like some of the tiny linguistic minorities: Russification was always a danger which state action, in the direction of labour for example, tended to contribute to rather than to counter. Groups exercised cultural control in the Soviet Union only within the various sorts of autonomous regions recognised as the homelands of nationalities – the Union republics and the autonomous republics, and the lesser administrative units – oblasts and okrugs – within them, exercising different powers depending upon the size and importance of the nationalities they were set up for.6 Not only were diaspora nationalities like the Jews left without control of their own cultural development, but those large numbers of people living outside the recognised territory of their nationality lacked any influence over it. Cultural control did not extend to the imposition of internal restrictions on members of nationalities within their territories as it had under the 169


Tsars. Then some groups had been governed under laws not applied elsewhere in the Empire, under Islamic law for instance. But precisely because such restrictions are justifiable only on the assumption of a group’s distinctive values, they were not imposed under the Soviet system; indeed they were eliminated,7 so that Soviet law applied equally to all citizens. Similarly, cultural representation existed only in a very qualified form. Political representation in the Soviet Union and its constituent parts depended upon citizenship, not upon nationality; though the Union was a federation of republics each forming a territory of one or more nationalities. Cultural representation implies cultural recognition, that is the explicit specification of certain cultural groupings as those to be taken account of in political arrangements. The Soviet system of personal nationality was a particularly comprehensive example. It is important to note, however, that the other three types of right do not necessarily imply cultural recognition. Expression can be permitted without specifying what language, say, is allowed, though for its use in political business and the like it would need to be specified. Cultural protection might in theory be achieved through ad hoc measures without formal recognition and cultural control could be exercised by groups simply as a result of the state not interfering rather than by their being explicitly recognised and granted powers over their members. The Soviet system, then, was one way in which cultural diversity has been addressed, and which illustrates some of the issues that such policies must confront. Clearly Marxism had an influence on the Soviet system, not least in the provisional character of cultural groupings within it and in policies permitting ‘progressive’ change, often equated in practice with Russification. Equality, though, was the dominant value, dictating at least theoretically the same opportunities for different cultures, including raising the living standards of economically disadvantaged groups, without which they would lack opportunities for cultural fulfilment. It is equally clear, however, that factors having little to do with Marxism were in play, in particular in the way that cultural diversity was conceptualised as group differentiation in terms of features independent of value. In the rest of the chapter we shall investigate different types of political arrangement for handling cultural diversity, comparing and contrasting them with the Soviet example. ASSIMILATION AND INTEGRATION

In a useful classification of the ways that polities have been structured to accommodate cultural diversity, Bhikhu Parekh distinguishes five 170

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models, which he dubs proceduralist, assimilationist, bifurcationist, pluralist and ‘millet’.8 We shall look first at assimilationism – the doctrine that a stable and cohesive state requires a shared culture, so that all cultures within the state must assimilate to it – and bifurcationism, or, as it is better known, integrationism. Integrationism may be viewed as a modification of assimilationism, requiring only that a shared political culture is required, so that cultural diversity in other areas of life remains possible. Parekh views the shared cultures required in both these models crucially to involve shared values, though it is evident that in principle forms of the two models could be devised demanding only a shared language and related cultural practices, or both shared language and values. In the case of values, for example, the Soviet Union was clearly an assimilationist system, though the shared culture demanded – socialist culture – was not thought of as a specifically national culture.9 In the case of language, however, it equally clearly was not assimilationist.The Soviet system was, as we may put it, value assimilationist rather than value integrationist, because it failed to draw a sharp distinction between political and personal values, aiming for example to eliminate such practices as Islamic polygamy in Soviet Central Asia, which an integrationist regime ought, arguably, to tolerate. Assimilationism may be regarded as the denial of two putative cultural rights – the rights of cultural expression and of cultural recognition. In requiring conformity to shared norms within the state, assimilationism must deny the rights to express in social practices aspects of culture that deviate from these norms. In specifying (or otherwise indicating) a culture as that of the state, assimilationism must deny any right to the recognition of alternative cultures. Integrationism basically shares these characteristics, while limiting, rather than denying, rights of cultural expression. It could, for other purposes, permit the recognition of specific cultures, but not as an aspect of the political arrangements of the state, to which only the supposedly shared political culture is relevant.The distinction between assimilationism and integrationism is, however, a distinction of degree only, since complete assimilation of all cultural difference to a common standard can never be demanded, so that in thinking about assimilation we need to be clear about just what aspects of culture are to be assimilated and which are not. Only then will we know what rights are conceded, whether explicitly or implicitly, though only explicitly conceded and officially countenanced rights can be viewed as part of the political arrangements of the state. Assimilationism can be argued for from a variety of philosophical 171


positions, depending upon the particular shape it takes. Characteristically the demand for assimilation to a national culture, construed in terms of national values, would be conservative, emphasising the supposed impossibility of a viable statehood in the absence of the shared values which result from the living of a common life over time. On this kind of account the values in question are likely to be highly particularised, involving attachment to these people and to this place, a commitment to the working out of this history and destiny, and love of just these artistic and literary productions. Indeed, conservatism is unlikely to draw a distinction between the sharing of values and of other cultural characteristics, including linguistic ones, regarding all as part of an organic unity. It is equally true that the conservative account leaves it unclear whether it is only common culture that is required or also a common ethnicity (or even race).While more generalised values may be adopted or abandoned, it is less clear that the more particularised values and attachments of a supposedly national culture can be similarly chosen, for they would seem to depend upon a shared ethnic identification which cannot be had for the asking. A common language culture, at least in the rich sense that conservative nationalists may demand it, also depends in practice upon a shared ethnicity.Assimilation, then, though it can in theory remain merely a cultural requirement, is likely under conservatism to become an ethnic one as well. A more general reason for assimilationism can be derived from the communitarian thesis that the political arrangements of a state must be justified in terms of the moral claims of a community, in particular their claim to have a state which aims to secure the common good through policies that reflect shared values. The sort of conservative nationalism we have just looked at can easily go hand in hand with the cultural communitarianism investigated in Chapter 5, which, as we saw, is equally hostile to difference, so that, short of excluding diversity, it must assimilate it to ensure the functioning community which justifies the state. Neither theory does much to make assimilationism credible. It is not plausible to suppose that cultural assimilation of the scope implied by the model, in relation to either values or language, is required for a well-functioning state. Nor would it be reasonable for a community itself culturally homogeneous to claim the right to a state which demanded the assimilation of minorities if a state which did not make this demand could also secure its common good, as a well-functioning state should do. It is simply not evident that loyalties to such a state need to be grounded on loyalties to a cultural community of the kind 172

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in question; nor that values as comprehensive as those of such a community need to be shared by citizens for them to recognise what the state delivers as their common good.The last point tells equally against the demand for shared socialist values which replace all others, made by the value assimilationism of the Soviet state. But even if a state with shared values were more stable and cohesive than one without them, this, and the social harmony that goes with it, would have been bought at a high price in terms of individual freedom. These objections may lead one to embrace integrationism, most probably in the shape of republicanism. Here the communitarian argument can be more credibly deployed in its republican form, for now the community in question is not a pre-existing cultural one, but rather a community itself inherently political, shaped by shared political action and the common political values that such activity brings. Then all that is demanded is a readiness to participate in the political community and to adopt its values – to integrate, as this notion is commonly used, precisely to distinguish the process from assimilation, as we noted in Chapter 5. For integration permits the retention of distinctive and diverse values so long as these are consistent with shared political ones, and indeed the maintenance of cultural group boundaries so long as these do not mark the sites of competing political communities. Integrationism may seem to offer, then, the prospect of political stability combined with considerable individual liberty. We have, in the closing pages of Chapter 5 and in the previous chapter, already discussed some of the difficulties that stand in the way of a republican ideal which best expresses integrationism. Identification in terms of membership of cultural, and more particularly ethnic groups can block the kind of consensus-building upon which depends the formation of shared political values under republicanism. Such identification is an understandable reaction to a situation in which one’s values stand out as minority ones, not easily assimilable even at the public level to those of the dominant culture.10 Minority groups are then unable to acknowledge the political values of the state which shape its laws and institutions as in any sense their own, and come to view them as an alien imposition, as, no doubt, in many cases they are. Integrationism requires particular circumstances to constitute a viable option for dealing with diversity: some kinds of diversity are harder to accommodate within it than others, and the differences between Western liberalism or socialism and Islam have proved particularly 173


intractable. In the early days of the Soviet Union a Muslim section of the Communist Party was set up under Sultan-Galiev,11 whose goal was a republic within the federation which would unite Muslims under a regime combining the progressive features of Islam with Communism. Sultan-Galiev regarded the dominance of Russians within the Soviet state as constituting a colonialist imposition of Western values inessential to a Communist republic. Sultan-Galiev perished in Stalin’s purges, but his project illustrates what is often forgotten, that republicanism need not be predicated upon a Western system of political values and may, in different forms, be a suitable response to situations of cultural diversity, as, for example, that of Muslim peoples who are, apart from their common Islamic faith, culturally quite heterogeneous. PROCEDURALISM

Proceduralism12 is a response to diversity which abandons the attempt to identify common values or other common cultural characteristics as a basis for a shared polity. All that it requires is that citizens submit to the authority of the state, which for its part, interferes as little as possible with their varying cultural practices. In terms of the axes of definition employed in the last section we can characterise proceduralism as, on the one hand, permitting cultural expression through political arrangements which embody such rights, while, on the other, not conceding recognition to any specific cultural identities. What proceduralism does, in other words, is to permit cultural expression without specifying what cultures and practices are granted it. It grants it, in Hobbes’s phrase, simply by ‘the silence of the law’13 on points that might bear on cultural expression. The cosmopolitan society of the Roman Empire was, in many respects, run on proceduralist lines and enjoyed the kind of toleration which this implies.14 Proceduralism as here characterised is, however, more recently associated with regimes of what we characterised in Chapter 4 as Reformation Liberalism, and we shall examine it hereafter only in this application. An influential version of this kind of liberalism is due to Robert Nozick. Nozick defends ‘a minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on.’15 Within such a minimal state many different kinds of community can flourish, each with its own set of values and other cultural characteristics.Thus ‘though the framework is libertarian and laissez-faire, individual communities within it need not be’.16 People can 174

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enter these communities if admitted and leave them at will, but the communities may impose internal restrictions which limit the freedom of members qua members. It is a corollary of this way of maximising freedom of cultural expression that communities have the right of cultural control. But again this is a right conceded simply through the fact of non-interference in their affairs, not through any explicit provisions specifying which communities may have control. Individual freedom is guaranteed within such a system only by the right of exit, established by virtue of the state’s duty to prevent coercion. According to this conception, cultural communities are essentially voluntary associations, and the control accorded them is, in effect, a consequence of the right of free association conceded to citizens. What is not conceded, however, in Nozick’s theory, which contrasts it with some other forms of Reformation Liberalism, is that the state itself should be an association which members may control at will, using it to realise whatever values they share, provided that they do not infringe the individual freedoms of others. For the minimalism of the state precisely proscribes this kind of development – a minimalism Nozick believes to be necessary to prevent infringement of liberty. A similar theory has been developed in detail by Chandran Kukathas, which is explicitly intended to tackle the policy issues posed by actual cases of cultural diversity within the state in a way that Nozick’s is not. Indeed Kukathas argues that ‘liberalism is fundamentally a theory of multiculturalism’, for its commitment to freedom of association and to toleration is a response to just this condition of society. It is a response which Kukathas characterises as ‘the politics of indifference’,17 for what is crucial to it is that the state takes no interest in people’s cultural identities or in the values and practices associated with them. Nor, he suggests, is liberalism ‘concerned directly to promote human flourishing: it has no collective projects’.18 The liberalism Kukathas is commending is not, then, an Enlightenment or Romantic Liberalism, both of which aim at developing individual autonomy and the well-chosen lives to which autonomy supposedly gives rise. Kukathas’ liberalism simply tolerates what people do, however heteronomous and unfulfilling. For toleration, he argues, is not to be justified as advancing autonomy. Rather toleration is to be espoused because it is a necessary condition for making a rational assessment of different conceptions of the good life. This is why Kukathas can maintain that ‘toleration . . . is valuable because it is the condition which gives judgements worth’;19 for their having worth depends upon the appeal they make to public reason, an appeal that can be 175


made only if all the options within the space of public reason are kept open in the way that toleration allows them to be. Kukathas mounts a powerful defence of the proceduralist stance as manifest in Reformation Liberalism. But it is uncompromising in its consequences. It does not, we should notice, do anything to concede a right of cultural protection. Cultural assimilation is, as Kukathas puts it, ‘a part of the way of the world’,20 and simply a result of the way people exercise their choices.The kind of state Kukathas supports may make assimilation highly likely for economically disadvantaged or minority groups, but that is the outcome of inequalities which a truly tolerant state can do nothing to remove.The freedom such toleration protects is here privileged, as we may think, over justice. Yet the most striking case of this stems from Kukathas’ refusal – following Nozick – to proscribe cultural practices that seem manifestly to be unjust, in, for example, their treatment of women.‘Even in cases where there is clear evidence of terrible practices,’ says Kukathas, ‘there is good reason not to give established authority the right to intervene’,21 for persuasion is morally preferable and more effective than force, and does not damage group life. Many feminists, for example, will not be persuaded by such considerations, especially if they are unconvinced that the right of exit can realistically be exercised by subordinate members of an oppressive and dogmatic cultural group. This last point hints at a possible paradox in Kukathas’ position. For, one might ask, what is the point of making the options for a good life available through a regime of toleration unless those who choose between them are educated and informed in a way that enables them to make a rational choice? But to insist on such an exposure to options would be to interfere, intolerantly, with the instructional practices of cultural groups, and thereby to restrict the range of options available for choice, as Kukathas accepts. His argument for toleration, then, seems self-defeating. On the one hand he regards cultural groups as voluntary associations; but on the other he denies a right to the conditions for making a rational choice of membership. Without these the right of exit which supposedly safeguards individual freedom may be purely nominal, and continued membership of a cultural group may be in practice involuntary. And this involuntariness may be an aspect of the group that strikes its members as a feature of the good life. Parekh believes that proceduralism in general is incoherent for another reason, namely that neither the state’s mode of governance nor its system of laws can be neutral in regard to the values of the different cultures within it. A system of representation, for example, 176

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will be based either on a franchise of undifferentiated individuals or on delegations from groups (perhaps cultural groups). It thus reflects views about social organisation that may be disputed within the state. Even more obviously, laws, especially those relating to family life, will not be neutral. ‘The unity of a political community,’ he concludes, ‘cannot rest on procedural foundations alone.’22 Kukathas’ response to this would be to deny that the state is a community at all. It is, he suggests,‘an association of associations . . . a political settlement which encompasses these diverse associations.’23 Kukathas would not deny that a mode of governance and laws must be agreed, but he would argue that they represent simply an agreement on the norms of civil life hammered out between citizens, not a set of public values that is the basis for social unity.24 Walzer, in a direct reply to Kukathas, does not believe that this represents an enduring possibility: ‘every settlement’, he suggests, ‘is on its way to becoming a way of life . . . at least a common political life. The result . . . is that every domestic society develops’– pace Kukathas – ‘a “common moral standpoint”’.25 Even if Walzer is right, however, the attitude of toleration that Kukathas commends may still be one worth cultivating politically, allied as it is to a proper scepticism about one’s own values. It was this that was signally lacking in the Soviet Union, a state in which, in principle though obviously not in practice, the regime of toleration commended by Kukathas could have been applied alongside the recognition of language groups. Failure to exercise such toleration, especially in respect of Muslim peoples, hampered the development of a political settlement, let alone a political community, in these areas, and contributed directly to the eventual secessions and civil wars which marked the Soviet Union’s dissolution. PLURALISM

The proceduralist model embodies what Charles Taylor calls ‘the politics of equal dignity’, by which ‘what is established is meant to be universally the same, an identical basket of rights and immunities.’26 Against this Taylor pits ‘the politics of difference’ which arises from people’s demands to be recognised as distinctive by virtue of, for example, their cultural identities. It is just such distinctiveness that proceduralism is blind to and, as we have seen, can in practice threaten through privileging the dominant culture. Whether as a reaction to this, or for other reasons having to do with the strength of cultural or ethnic identification, the demand for cultural recognition has become 177


a prevalent feature of multicultural societies. Now it is an almost inevitable concomitant of this demand for cultural recognition that cultural protection will be sought, protection which, as we have noticed, proceduralism can do nothing to provide.To fail to provide protection will be viewed as withholding any acknowledgement of the importance of the culture for its members, and thus not granting it recognition, or doing so only nominally. But such protection will, as Taylor makes clear, require differential treatment of citizens – different baskets of rights and immunities tailored to the needs of different groups – and thus a breach in the principle of universality (or indifference, as we have seen Kukathas punningly express it) which characterises proceduralism. The politics of difference provides a pluralist model for dealing with diversity.27 It grants, if not comprehensively as in the Soviet Union, then at least to certain specific groups for which particular political arrangements are to be made, the right of cultural recognition. But, along the other axis we are employing to characterise these models, it does not, as we shall shortly see, grant unlimited rights of cultural expression, as proceduralism aims to do. Perhaps the most general reason why recognition does not, unexpectedly, go along with untrammelled freedom of cultural expression is because under pluralism groups are recognised for their value to their members, so that insofar as their practices have a negative value they forfeit their claim to free expression. The kind of liberalism which favours pluralism is, Taylor makes clear, ‘not a possible meeting ground for all cultures, but is the political expression of one range of cultures, and quite incompatible with other ranges . . . The hospitable variant, I espouse,’ he continues,‘has to draw the line.’28 Thus many of the practices which a proceduralist liberal like Kukathas is prepared to condone are proscribed by a pluralist liberal like Taylor. Cultural recognition within his kind of liberal state comes at a price. The most worked out treatment of this type of pluralist liberalism is Will Kymlicka’s, which we have already touched upon when discussing Enlightenment Liberalism in Chapter 4. Kymlicka, it will be recalled, adheres to the Enlightenment view that it is the exercise of individual autonomy that, pre-eminently, the political arrangements of a state should optimise. The value of cultural membership stems from the supposed fact that it is required for such autonomy, since a person’s culture provides the context of their choices. It is for this reason that culture is for Kymlicka essentially language culture, since a person’s – or a group’s – values are the consequence of, not the 178

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condition for, choice. Scope for autonomy would itself be reduced if cultural membership committed people to some unchanging values. Recognition of cultures is an acknowledgement of the value of cultural membership for individual autonomy, and cultural protection needs to be extended to threatened groups in order to equalise the opportunities for an autonomous life amongst citizens. Similarly, although Kymlicka is willing to limit cultural expression only reluctantly and with considerable qualification,29 nonetheless it is when a group’s practices involve internal restrictions or other threats to the autonomy of its members that he is prepared to limit their rights of cultural expression. Since Kymlicka excludes values from the constitutive features of a culture, the more liberal practices that result from such limitations do not change the group’s culture, only its character – a conclusion remarkably similar to that reached by Soviet theorists about their differently motivated interference in cultural practices. Kymlicka draws a sharp distinction between two sorts of group to be encountered in a multicultural society: on the one side, indigenous peoples and, on the other, immigrant groups.30 Indigenous peoples enjoy what Kymlicka refers to as societal cultures, which provide for a complete way of life across both public and private spheres. These he views as nations, in line, as we have seen, with Soviet practice. Multicultural societies comprising such groups are, then, multinational. Immigrant groups, by contrast, contribute to making up what he calls polyethnic states. Their cultures are practised only in the private sphere and their lives lived out, for the rest, in the shared public one into which they are integrated. Kymlicka regards indigenous national minorities and immigrant groups as having different and differently grounded rights. National minorities are entitled to whatever is required for them to continue to exist, as providing a viable option which their members may choose for their preferred way of life. It is in this way that their members’ autonomy is maximised, and this may require selfgovernment. Immigrant groups, however, are not similarly entitled since their members are taken to have already exercised their autonomy in choosing to live in an alien land and thereby to have accepted the requirements of a different way of life. Their ‘polyethnic rights’ are ‘intended to help ethnic groups and religious minorities express their cultural particularity and pride’, while at the same time ‘to promote integration into the larger society’.31 Again the level of cultural protection provided is aimed at maximising their members’ autonomy. This demarcation of cultural rights is highly questionable. Diaspora peoples like the Jews do not fall easily on either side of Kymlicka’s 179


distinction, and, importantly, they lack the compact territories which Kymlicka sees as characteristic of national minorities – perhaps even essential to their having societal cultures. Certainly the Jews were perceived as posing a problem in the Soviet Union,32 precisely because they lacked a territory and a common economic life. An attempt was made to change this by setting up an autonomous republic for them – Biro-Bidjan – but this failed or was abandoned. Nonetheless, they were recognised as a nationality and Yiddish was protected, at least sporadically, as their national language.Yet their anomalous position vis à vis most recognised nationalities, the religious aspects of their culture and their solidarity with fellow Jews elsewhere, tending in the limit to Zionism, led to repeated attempts at assimilation on the one hand or to anti-Semitism on the other. It is quite unclear that an ostensibly liberal theory like Kymlicka’s would have fared any better. For despite his avowed commitment to autonomy, it is not, in the final analysis, what people want, what they themselves actually value, that determines what rights he allows them. It is rather the nature of the culture they have. According to Kymlicka, as we have seen, ‘national minorities have societal cultures, and immigrant groups do not.’33 It is the value that Kymlicka descries in a societal culture – that of providing a rich and secure context of choice – which supposedly entitles certain indigenous peoples to rights denied to immigrant groups. Similar judgements were made by Soviet theorists about the Union’s diverse cultural groups. In both cases they are based, I argue, on an untenable functionalism which parcels culture out amongst systemically bounded groups in an unrealistic and, in its effects, illiberal way. These features of Kymlicka’s pluralism – the contextual view of culture and the dichotomising of multinationality and polyethnicity – may be detached from its fundamental grounding in the value of autonomy. This value has been appealed to by other theorists, for example Joseph Raz, whom we categorised in Chapter 4 as a Romantic Liberal in contrast to Kymlicka’s Enlightenment variety. Raz believes that there is a liberal case for what he calls ‘the affirmation of multiculturalism’, because ‘it emphasises the role of cultures as a precondition for, and a factor which gives shape and content to, individual freedom.’34 It does this because freedom can be exercised only against a background of rules which give one’s choices meaning, and these rules are what culture provides. So far this is similar to Kymlicka’s contextualist account. But Raz sees a positive value in a plurality of cultures, and this plays no essential part in Kymlicka’s account. Thus, far from wishing for the integration of immigrant 180

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groups, the cultures whose diversity Raz affirms are those of ‘different communities’ which ‘share the same public places and common services, and . . . mix in work places and in leisure facilities.’35 The plurality which such a society offers is valuable because it conduces to autonomy in providing people with a variety of possible ways of life, each valuable in its own way. It will be apparent from this description that Raz’s conception of cultures, unlike Kymlicka’s, involves characterising them in terms of the values which they espouse as well as of their other components. For it is precisely because different cultures promote different values that a plurality of them in a society amplifies the scope for autonomy. Like Kymlicka, however, Raz imposes restrictions on cultures where they engage in practices which threaten the autonomy of their members; in this connection he mentions ‘slave cultures, racially discriminatory cultures, and homophobic cultures’36 as beyond the pale, and requiring reform or even repression.This, though, requires caution, for even oppressive cultures offer their members much that a new one may be unable to replace. Such scruples echo Kymlicka’s. But the view of culture Raz shares with him, which stresses the importance of cultural group membership for personal autonomy, surely sits ill with Raz’s pluralism. For if meaningful choice requires a framework of values provided by one’s own culture then it is hard to see how choosing between cultures, which pluralism facilitates, can be a meaningful possibility. Of course, those who dispense with Kymlicka’s and Raz’s persistent assumption37 that cultures come parcelled up in separate groups will not have a particular problem with such cross-cultural choices. But this should not lead one to think that people can pick just any cultural values in any circumstances. Solidarity, for example, can flourish only against a certain socio-economic background, self-help against another, and facts of this sort, well-understood by Marxists, raise doubts about the scope for value pluralism which Raz takes for granted. Cultures are not consumer goods.The good society which Raz depicts is, indeed, in marked contrast to the social conditions that prevailed in the old Soviet Union, where the absence of adequate cultural choice did hamper the development of personal autonomy. However, Soviet failure to provide for such choice was not analogous to its failure to provide the same variety of consumer goods as were available in the West. Yet, as in planned economies like the Soviet Union planners decide what shall appear in shops, so Raz does not flinch from the conclusion that in liberal societies the state should determine what 181


cultural options there should be by exercising its power to suppress repugnant ones.Whatever one thinks of the ethics of this suggestion, it implies an even greater optimism about the power of legislators to exercise cultural control than that of the Soviet planners. CULTURAL SEPARATION

The final model for multicultural society we shall consider is what Parekh refers to as the ‘millet’ model, after the millet system which prevailed in the Ottoman Empire. In this system the various religious communities – Muslims, Jews and Christian groups – were, for certain purposes, self-governing and could impose internal restrictions upon their members.38 Parekh generalises this to any system in which ‘individuals are above all cultural beings and embedded in specific communities . . . the state has no moral status, and its sole raison d’être is to uphold and nurture its constituent cultural communities.’39 This may well be a romanticisation of the historical millets, which lumped peoples together – Bulgarians with Greeks and so on – for administrative convenience rather on principles of the sort that Parekh adumbrates. Nevertheless his model is a useful idealisation, enabling us to focus on a method of dealing with multiculturalism quite different from the others. It is a method which prioritises cultural identity by making it the determinant of the jurisdiction under which people fall, quite independently of the areas in which they happen to live. It differs sharply, then, from the Soviet system in which nationalities were recognised, but the jurisdiction of the national regions was territorial not personal.40 For it makes no presumption that the normal state of things is that cultural groups are living in separate areas, rather than mingling promiscuously, as in many parts of the world they always have. The millet model, broadly conceived, may be thought of as a way of maximising cultural expression through granting cultural recognition, which it does in a fairly comprehensive fashion.The mechanism which links cultural recognition to expression is the cultural control put into the hands of the group recognised, thereby removing it from the possible ambit of state action.The point of recognition, then, is not just to concede rights to individuals by virtue of their specific cultural identities, but to give cultural groups a corporate existence which enables them to act on behalf of their cultures. Insofar as a right of cultural protection is conceded it is, essentially, through granting the groups themselves powers to protect their cultures, rather than 182

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through using the powers of the central state. In addition to internal restrictions on members, which may be extensive to the point of denying a right of exit, certain external restraints on non-members may be allowed. But owing to the fact that the various groups live intermingled in a millet-model society, there would be much less scope for these restraints than if there were territorial separation. Systems conforming to the millet model are what many cultural minorities are calling for, in particular Muslim minorities in European states who point out that modified versions of it operated in British India and French North Africa41 – as, indeed, they did in Central Asia under Russian rule prior to the 1917 revolution.The motive for these calls is a conviction that the values of different cultural groups are incompatible, and that this incompatibility cannot be handled by relegating culturally specific practices to the private realm, as in integrationism. Nor, it is argued, can liberal regimes cope with it any better, partly because they too involve a shared body of laws, partly because they lead in practice to assimilation, either through the advantage that the dominant Western culture has in cultural competition or through its privileging of autonomy over other political values. Separation, it is concluded, in the way provided for in the millet model, is the appropriate response to cultural diversity that involves incompatible values, as we should allow that some diversity does. Underlying such calls for the introduction of the millet model is a cultural communitarianism adapted, as the more common cultural nationalist communitarianism is not, to the facts of cultural intermingling often brought about by population movements, forced or unforced.This kind of communitarianism sees identities as constituted in the first instance through membership of cultural communities, and seeks political arrangements which will maintain these communities in the way that in other circumstances nation-states might do. It seeks what, in a slightly broader context, Iris Marion Young dubs ‘separatism’42 – a term which neatly captures the affinity between this strategy and that of national secession which we shall consider in the next chapter.Young believes that separatism as a reaction to assimilation and to liberal individualism has many positive features – promoting cultural autonomy, and challenging both the cultural domination and the processes of social exclusion which social categorisation by a dominant group entails.Yet Young also thinks that separatists embrace an essentialist conception of cultural groups which fails to appreciate that ‘a social group exists and is defined as a specific group only in social and interactive relation to others,’ so that ‘group identity is not 183


a set of objective facts, but the product of experienced meanings.’43 This leads, she maintains, to tendencies both to simplify and purify group identities and to insulate and freeze them – tendencies which ignore the complex interaction and interdependence of the groups in question. There is a good deal of justice in these criticisms, but it is less clear that Young’s proposed political via media between assimilation and separation entirely escapes them. She holds that, on the one hand, different cultural groups should recognise that they participate in the same society and accept the same polity, but, on the other, that they have differentiated places in it, since their members participate by virtue of their cultural identities which the polity recognises as distinct.This implies cultural representation. But it also implies what Young calls ‘group-conscious’ policies rather than ones that are neutral in the sense of being blind to group difference, though there must also, she thinks, be a safety net of civil rights applicable to all.44 Such political arrangements clearly have affinities with the millet model as we have described it, and they too aim to maximise cultural expression through cultural recognition. They contrast with the millet model, perhaps, only in allowing a greater role to the state, through mechanisms of cultural representation, and a smaller one to cultural groups as politically corporate bodies exercising cultural control over their members. This does not amount, however, to acceptance of the idea that the state can pursue some common good, which Young regards as ‘mythical’.45 Young’s anti-separatism extends to a thoroughgoing opposition to nationalism as representing ‘white male bourgeois unity and universality.’46 David Miller, as we have seen in Chapter 5, takes issue with Young’s ‘radical multiculturalism’, which holds that the ideal state is not the nation-state but one ‘composed of a plurality of nations or cultural groups’47 organised as we have just seen. This position relies, Miller argues, ‘upon a false contrast between the allegedly authentic group identities that a multicultural politics is supposed to express, and an artificially imposed common nationality’,48 whereas in fact national identities are no less good or genuine than other group identities. Miller’s criticism is, however, unfair to Young, who opposes this idea of authenticity as applied to any cultural identity. Rather she thinks that group identities emerge from their members’ ‘subjective affirmation of affinity with that group’.49 The difference between Young and Miller, then, turns upon whether she is right in founding the political arrangements of a society on those group identities that people are currently most comfortable with; or whether he is right in founding 184

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them upon those that, in his view, people should adopt to form a political community. Miller argues that national identities better satisfy the latter condition. But, as we have seen,Young denies that there really is any commonality that such identities express. It is fragmentation within the state, preventing effective citizenship, that worries Miller in regard to Young’s ‘politics of difference’, and which concerns Parekh in regard to millet models generally.50 It is the development of group identities firmly fixed over time that poses the greatest threat here51 – a development to which millet models arguably contribute. Despite her protestations in favour of ‘the importance of a fluid and relational conception of group difference, which understands groups as overlapping, criss-crossing, and with undecidable borders’,52 it is unclear whether in practice Young’s politics can escape these dangers. It may not be, as she argues in the passage from which this quotation is drawn, because of some essentialist separatism inherent in them that Soviet-style personal nationalities generated identifications that have led to appalling ethnic violence and injustice in recent years. It may simply be, as Rogers Brubaker maintains,53 that it is the institutionalised recognition of such self-understandings – self-understandings that many would not have had without such recognition – which has these destructive consequences anyway. For such politically institutionalised self-understandings lead naturally enough to ethnic separation and exclusion. If this is so then the justice for minorities which Young’s politics of difference is designed to achieve is surely bought at too high a price in terms of the loss of social stability and consent to the state. And this may be the final judgement on the millet model generally. Why, though, should we expect a general judgement on how people of different cultures can live together in the same state anyway? The fact that different political theories generate different general answers may simply reflect their own limitations. Some of these are due, I have hinted, to the particular historical circumstances in which they have arisen. Apt for dealing with some kinds of diversity, they prove unfit for tackling others. So an answer to the question we started this chapter with may be that we must look in detail at the kinds of cultural diversity that are in question, the extent and nature of the cultural affinities and differences they manifest, and the traditions within cultures for coping with various kinds of divergence between them. None of this offers any guarantee of a solution acceptable on all sides without considerable compromise. But assuredly the chances of finding an accommodation in any given circumstances will be hampered by 185


ignoring these complexities and falling back into the over-simplification about cultural groups against which we have repeatedly inveighed. NOTES 1. The much-cited example is the creation of French culture descrbed in E. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (London: Chatto, 1977). 2. The classic account is by Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, The Great Challenge: Nationalities and the Bolshevik State 1917–1930 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1992). 3. See G. Smith (ed.), The Nationalities Question in the Soviet Union (London: Longman, 1990), Part 4. 4. In accordance with Stalin’s ‘Marxism and the national question’ in D. Lane (ed.), Politics and Society in the USSR (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1972), pp. 471–8. 5. That is to what Kymlicka calls ‘external protection’: Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: OUP, 1995), pp. 35–44. 6. For a detailed, if polemical, account, see Walker Connor, The National Question in Marxist Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984), pp. 302–22. 7. See d’Encausse, Great Challenge, pp. 161–72. 8. B. Parekh, ‘Balancing unity and diversity in multicultural societies’, in D. Avnon and A. de-Shalit (eds), Liberalism and its Practice (London: Routledge, 1999). The ensuing characterisation of these models follows Parekh unless otherwise stated.Their delineation in terms of the granting or denial of cultural rights of expression and recognition is, however, mine not his. 9. On the importance of this, see Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), pp. 26–9. 10. Cp. M.Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven: Yale UP, 1997), p. 84. 11. See H. B. Davis, Toward a Marxist Theory of Nationalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), pp. 95–9. 12. Following Parekh, this term is used in a rather more general sense than when it is, as commonly, associated with the Enlightenment Liberalism of John Rawls. 13. T. Hobbes, Leviathan [1651], ch. 21. Chandran Kukathas makes the connection in his ‘Liberalism and multiculturalism’, Political Theory 26 (1998), pp. 686–99. 14. As Walzer notes in On Toleration, pp. 14–19 (though he brackets this with the toleration offered under the ‘millet’ model). 15. R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), p. ix. 16. Ibid. p. 320. 17. C. Kukathas,‘Liberalism, multiculturalism, oppression’, in A.Vincent (ed.), Political Theory:Tradition and Diversity (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), pp. 134–5. 18. Kukathas, ‘Liberalism and multiculturalism’, p. 691.

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19. C. Kukathas, ‘Cultural toleration’, in I. Shapiro and W. Kymlicka (eds), Ethnicity and Group Rights (New York: New York UP, 1997), p. 79. 20. Kukathas, ‘Liberalism, multiculturalism, oppression’, p. 137. 21. Kukathas, ‘Cultural toleration’, p. 89. 22. Parekh, ‘Balancing unity and diversity’, pp. 113–14. 23. Kukathas, ‘Cultural toleration’, p. 94. 24. Kukathas denies this is only a modus vivendi, by which he means an agreement which reflects only the balance of power between the parties: ibid. p. 84. 25. M.Walzer,‘Response to Kukathas’, in Shapiro and Kymlicka, Ethnicity and Group Rights, p. 108. 26. C.Taylor, Multiculturalism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994), p. 38. 27. Parekh extends pluralism beyond the recognition and support of cultural minorities to the incorporation of their ‘values and aspirations’ in the community’s political culture: see ‘Balancing Unity and Diversity’, p. 111. This seems to me an additional and inessential element. 28. Taylor, Multiculturalism, p. 62. 29. W. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: OUP, 1995), ch. 8. 30. Ibid. ch. 2. 31. Ibid. p. 31. 32. See Davis, Toward a Marxist Theory, pp. 128–34; d’Encausse, Great Challenge, pp. 148–51; Smith, Nationalities Question, ch. 21. 33. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 107. 34. J. Raz, ‘Multiculturalism: A liberal perspective’, in his Ethics in the Public Domain (Oxford: OUP, 1994), pp. 158, 163. 35. Ibid. p. 159. 36. Ibid. p. 169. 37. Raz is more equivocal on this point than Kymlicka, regarding a multicultural society as capable of developing a common culture; ibid. p. 176. 38. For a discussion, see R. Grillo, Pluralism and the Politics of Difference (Oxford: OUP, 1998), ch. 4. 39. Parekh, ‘Balancing unity and diversity’, p. 111. 40. See Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, ch. 2. 41. See Grillo, Pluralism, pp. 203–7. 42. I. M. Young, ‘Together in difference: Transforming the logic of group political conflict’, in W. Kymlicka (ed.), The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: OUP, 1995), p. 163.Young has a wider range of cultural differences in mind than we are considering here, including that between e.g. homosexuals and heterosexuals. 43. Ibid. p. 161. 44. I. M.Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990), ch. 6. 45. Ibid. p. 138. 46. Ibid. p. 119. 47. Ibid. p. 180. 48. D. Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: OUP, 1995), p. 133.

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49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

Young, Justice and Politics of Difference, p. 172. Cp. Parekh, ‘Balancing unity and diversity’, p. 121. Cp.Anne Phillips, Democracy and Difference (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), ch. 5. Young, ‘Together in difference’, p. 168. Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed, pp. 48–51. Cp.Y. Slezkne, ‘The USSR as a communal apartment, or How a socialist state promoted ethnic particularism’, in G. Eley and R. G. Suny (eds), Becoming National (New York: OUP, 1996).

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9 SELF-DETERMINATION AND SECESSION

qw

THE RIGHT OF SELF-DETERMINATION

‘All peoples’, declare the United Nations Covenants on Human Rights, ‘have the right of self-determination.’1 It should by now be evident, however, that it is not at all obvious who is to count as a people. Does international law throw light on this question in a way that can resolve the conflicts which claims to self-determination commonly produce? Can it, for example, resolve the question of how the inhabitants of Ireland are to exercise their right of self-determination in a way that settles whether the Six Counties of Ulster should become part of the Irish Republic or remain in the United Kingdom? One side may claim that the people who possess this right are the people of Ireland as a whole, a vote among whom would probably reveal a majority in favour of reunifying the North into the rest of Ireland.The other side claims, however, that the people with the right are the people of Northern Ireland alone, among whom a majority against reunification would be found. How, then, are the peoples mentioned in the United Nations Article to be identified and what does the right it accords to them amount to? An answer to the former question is to some degree dependent on an answer to the latter. For what peoples are to be recognised in international law will depend upon how the political right of self-determination is to be understood, and this in its turn will depend upon what 189


sort of wrong is taken to be a violation of it.What is it not to be selfdetermining and what is wrong with it? It is, of course, to live under a form of government determined by others, not to be self-governing, and that is to lack a certain kind of freedom.The paradigm case of this is to be governed as a colony or within some other imperial order, and it is the rights of people not to be so governed that the United Nations Covenants were, inter alia, drawn up to defend. It is the freedom of a people that is being protected here, not directly that of individuals. For the right of self-determination entitles people to decide on the form of government they wish, and that may not be a liberal one which guarantees individual freedoms nor yet a democratic one in which individuals are free to participate in the political process.2 The freedom the right gives people is the collective freedom to determine their own affairs, rather than having them determined through institutions they cannot recognise as giving them their own government. What is wrong, though, with lacking this freedom? It is, after all, a point widely made about many former colonies that they were better off before self-government. Perhaps occasionally this is true.What has self-determination brought to these peoples? This is not an easy question to answer. But at least two approaches may be explored.The first moves away from emphasising freedom as what self-determination brings to focusing on justice. It is, it may be claimed, unjust that some people should be ruled by others, and thereby be denied opportunities to control their own affairs that the others enjoy.This is, other things being equal, discriminatory and unfair. An argument of this sort seems to lurk beneath the surface when the ‘equal rights and selfdetermination of peoples’ are bracketed together, as in the United Nations Charter.3 Here self-determination seems to be justified as a right of peoples because peoples are to be accorded equal rights and some are already self-determining.The difficulty here, of course, is that it is not clear what collectivities are to be treated as equal in this regard. The same difficulty arises if we adopt a second approach to justifying the right of self-determination, namely by trying to explain why the freedom it safeguards is valuable. To do this we would seem to need to identify the type of collectivity for which such a freedom is valuable. And this is so whether or not its value is explained in terms of the freedom it gives individual members, or whether it is to be explained independently of individual freedom or other individual goods, but in terms of what is good for a collectivity of such a kind as a whole. Nonetheless, to think in the former, individual-centred way 190

SELF-DETERMINATION AND SECESSION

is likely to produce a different answer from thinking in the latter, collectivity-centred one. For if we consider what individuals lack who are not members of a collectivity which is politically self-determining, we will think in terms of a deficiency in the way they are related to their government, a way which denies them appropriate control of the way they are governed. Therefore even if they are governed well this cannot be the result of their political agency, and if they are governed badly no political act of theirs can change things. To think in these terms is to think of a people as consisting of those who are governed together as a political unit, as, for example, a colony is. It is a political unit of this sort which has a right of self-determination under international law if self-determination is thought of as making good for its individual members what they lack under colonial and similar regimes. How, by way of illustration, might this legal conception of a people be applied to the Northern Ireland question? Ireland was never, properly speaking, a British colony. Indeed it was incorporated into the United Kingdom by the Act of Union (1801). But that incorporation was not recognised by many Irish people, on the grounds that the Irish parliament lacked the power to dissolve itself. Be that as it may, incorporation into the UK did not result in the Irish people enjoying self-determination since they were evidently treated as a subject people and, indeed, the point of incorporation was to deny them the self-government which might have rectified this situation. The case of Algeria’s incorporation into metropolitan France is an analogous one, not preventing the United Nations from recognising the Algerian people’s right of self-determination.4 Ireland as a whole, then, might be taken to be the territory whose people had a right of self-determination, a right which they arguably exercised in the 1918 Westminster election by returning over three-quarters of their Members of Parliament committed to Irish independence.5 Should we conclude that the partition of Ireland violated the Irish people’s right of self-determination? There are, it is true, general principles of international law according states the right of territorial integrity, and this has been extended by UN declarations to outlawing the dismemberment of colonies in the process of decolonisation.6 Perhaps this may provide some argument against the Irish partition. But it is evidently not one that derives solely from the right of a people to self-determination, and it is hard to see how this right can generate an argument against partition. It is one thing to say that the peoples who have a right of self-determination are those political units subjected to forms of government over which their members have no 191


control. It is quite another to say that their right of self-determination cannot be exercised in a way that divides these antecedent political units. For the unity of a people, on this conception, consists simply in the fact that its members have been governed together.They need not even have constituted a political association, since under colonialism no such association may have been possible. The point to be made, therefore, is that acknowledging the right of peoples to self-determination, as usually understood in international law,7 does nothing to indicate how this right is to be exercised, whether by a subject people as a whole, or in a way that may lead to partition, as arguably happened in Ireland. This follows directly from the fact that the justification of the right is in terms of its making possible the exercise of a certain individual freedom. But nothing can be deduced from the fact that an individual has that freedom about the identity of those others together with whom she will exercise it.While it is clear who, currently denied it, has the right, it is quite indeterminate what the scope of those who exercise it together should be. Further principles need to be appealed to in order to remove this indeterminacy. A purely pragmatic principle would be that the way the right of self-determination is exercised should not reproduce the conditions of political domination which the exercise of the right is intended to remove. That ostensibly was a reason for the partition of Ireland, though evidently in escaping the threat of Irish Catholic domination Ulster Protestants exposed their Catholic neighbours to a similar threat instead. It is hard to see that the pragmatic principle can always be applied in a way that avoids such results. There are other principles which might be invoked to overcome the indeterminacy of selfdetermination. One might, as noted above, appeal to the principle of respect for territorial integrity and defend this principle on the grounds that it promotes order and stability. But, as we have observed, such a principle has nothing to do with the reason for acknowledging the right of self-determination itself. Another, which does, justifies the right as implied by individual rights of personal autonomy. Then the political right of self-determination should be exercised in a way that maximises the individual’s chances of finding himself in the state of his choice.8 We shall return to this position later. Here we must note that there is no general assumption of it in international law, whatever its moral force may be. For the right of self-determination under international law does not consist in a right to determine the boundaries of one’s state, but rather not to be oppressed as a member of a subject 192


people within the boundaries of the political unit in which one finds oneself. A further type of principle which aims to specify how the right of self-determination is to be exercised again starts off from a particular justification of that right, namely that the freedom the right safeguards is valuable because it is a good for the kind of collectivity of which those with the right are members. This is to adopt the collectivity-centred approach to justifying the right we mentioned above, by contrast with the individual-centred one which we have so far been examining. What kind of collectivity might a people be such that it is valuable for it to be self-determining? The answer generally given here is that it is a nation, so that the right of peoples to self-determination is a right that nations have, a right, that is, of national self-determination. We shall go on to scrutinise this supposedly national right immediately. But we must note again that international law does not recognise it uncontroversially, perhaps in part because it is unclear what a nation is and thus unclear to whom a national right should be allowed. Was there in Ireland but one nation, or, as some who sought to amend the 1912 Home Rule Bill contended,9 two? This consideration introduces, it must be stressed, a quite different basis on which to judge how rights of self-determination are to be applied, and one with much more radical consequences than the rights conceded in international law. SECESSION

The right of self-determination allowed in international law is not equivalent to a right of secession, though many philosophers seem to assume that it is.10 A right of secession would be a right for a body of people to break away from their existing state and form a new one in their part of the old.The paradigmatic decolonisation cases of selfdetermination do not have this structure of the formation of new political units. Even those that seem to, like Ireland, are, it is supposed, cases where, despite formal incorporation, a part of the state is in fact treated as a separate political unit. Unionists, of course, disputed such a description, regarding the inauguration of the Irish Free State as a secession from the United Kingdom, in which Northern Ireland remained because the majority of its inhabitants were supposedly of British rather than Irish nationality. Specifically national self-determination must, however, entail a right of secession.11 For it entails that a nation can determine the way in which it is governed and, while its decision 193


may be to remain in the state as currently constituted, it may equally be to opt out of it. Self-determination in general cannot be constrained within the bounds prescribed by those who have in the past denied it, for to allow only regional autonomy or the like is not to permit untrammelled self-determination. While those who gain autonomy may be better able to determine the way they are governed than before – indeed, it may be the best way for them to be governed – still it is not necessarily the way they choose to be, and thus they lack self-determination. Yet the concept of national self-determination is not that of a subject people within a state having a right to secede from it. It is the idea that those who constitute a nation have a right to secede from a state involving other nations, whether or not they are in circumstances of subjection. Here it is useful to draw a distinction between what I shall call governmental secession, on the one hand, and national secession on the other. Governmental secession, I shall stipulate, occurs when people find themselves in certain circumstances that give them a reason for wanting to be governed separately from those along with whom they are currently governed. National secession, by contrast, occurs irrespective of people’s circumstances, but because the kind of collectivity they are, specifically being a nation, is taken to give them a reason for having a government separate from that of other nations. Bearing this distinction in mind, what rights of secession can we identify? Here we are raising primarily the question of what moral rights there are. There may be legal rights in a variety of cases. One we have already encountered in noticing that formal secession may sometimes be the legal right of a subject people. Another, clearly, will be the legal right of the members of a federation whose constitution permits secession, as in the former Soviet Union.While the former sort of right will be justifiable on moral grounds, the latter is likely to arise quite haphazardly, without any moral distinction between the cases where it is possessed and those where it is not. The interesting question is what, quite generally, might ground a moral right of secession. It is helpful here to follow Alan Buchanan12 in drawing a distinction between conceding a moral right to secede independently of considering what a system of international institutional morality would be like, and conceding one as a part of such a system. By institutional morality we are to understand a system which provides a moral underpinning for legal rights. In formulating it we have to ask what sort of an international order would result from conceding legal rights of secession in 194


certain kinds of instance, not just what moral rights would seem to be implied by general principles of ethics. I shall also follow Buchanan in supposing that the appropriate question to raise in asking what might ground a right of secession is a question of institutional morality.This does not imply, however, that we should consider only such factors as the effects of conceding certain kinds of right upon the world order that prevails within the existing state system.13 We need also to take account of the effects of granting or withholding a right on the peoples of those states and to ask whether in the light of these the existing system is defensible. Buchanan himself is prepared to concede rights only of what I have termed governmental secession, and not always those. Such secessions may be sought for a variety of reasons, including for economic or political advantage. That is the charge levelled by Irish Nationalists against Ulster Unionists whom they view as seceding from an Irish state in order to preserve their position of dominance, albeit in a smaller territory. By contrast with such cases, where separate government is supposedly sought to obtain advantages, are those where it is sought to remedy disadvantages arising from incorporation in a single state. It is among the latter cases that Buchanan discerns three situations where under certain strict conditions a right to secede may be allowed.14 The first is where a group – of whatever sort – has found itself the victim of unjust expropriation of its territory.This was part of the case for Irish independence from the United Kingdom and it is a case as strong in the North, which did not gain independence, as in the South, which did. It is, however, not such a straightforward kind of case as it may at first appear. To gain jurisdiction over territory previously under another’s jurisdiction is not the same thing as to seize another’s property; and while the former may, as in the Irish case, go along with the latter, it need not do so. Unjust loss of jurisdiction over one’s territory is no doubt a wrong for which secession may sometimes be a fitting remedy, but in explaining why it is we would need to say what kind of group has a right to jurisdiction over a territory. If we invoke such considerations we are no longer dealing simply with governmental secession. Indeed, if the kind of group accorded a right to jurisdiction is a national group then we are dealing with a case for national secession. No such difficulties are attendant upon Buchanan’s other two cases of a remedial right of secession. In one the right of secession is derived from a right to self-defence against gross violations of human rights, 195


most seriously those that threaten human life. Evidently those who find themselves in such circumstances will often do so by virtue of being members of a racial, ethnic or cultural group which is being persecuted. It is, however, simply as a collection of individuals in these circumstances that they have the right, not by virtue of the kind of group they belong to. Thus the fact that their secession may in these circumstances involve the redrawing of borders in a way that gives them a state which follows the contours of their ethnic group, say, is entirely fortuitous. They have no argument for a state as an ethnic group, only as people whose rights are violated and who need a separate state for their own protection. Doubtless the latter sort of argument from self-defence is often employed when what is wanted is really, say, an ethnically based state, and for this reason claims of rights violations and, more particularly, claims that there is a threat of them need to be carefully scrutinised. There is, for example, little apparent substance in Unionists’ claims that their rights would be seriously violated within a united Ireland. Similar considerations as those adduced above often apply to the last case in which Buchanan allows a remedial right of secession,15 namely where a section of a state’s population is subjected to unequal treatment that is economically exploitative, or, as Buchanan terms it, to discriminatory redistribution. One might wonder, however, why only economic unfairness is cited by Buchanan as sometimes justifying secession. For unequal treatment of other sorts, in particular with respect to people’s culture, might seem to generate an analogous argument. Buchanan does consider the case for secession to preserve a culture but he is extremely cautious about conceding it, arguing that other remedies may be available and that for a state to have to yield territory to cultural secessionists would be ‘a recipe for intolerably excessive international instability.’16 The difficulty here is that if people’s cultural practices are being jeopardised as a result of preferential treatment for a different language or customs, then other remedies may well be unavailable within a system that allows extensive state sovereignty over such matters. What we may need to contemplate here if secession seems an unattractive option – as well it might – are changes to the international order with the aim of guaranteeing certain cultural protections. In the absence of such international guarantees, however, secession on cultural grounds may sometimes be justified, even if we would not wish to concede any general right to it in institutional morality. For sometimes people are morally justified in doing things they have no right to do. 196


CULTURAL SEPARATISM

The case of cultural secession we have briefly touched on is, like the others just considered, a case of governmental secession, not a case of a group having grounds for separate statehood deriving from their being a group of a certain kind, in this case a cultural group. Indeed they may not even constitute anything recognisable as such a group if the kind of serious unequal treatment they are subjected to stems merely from the imposition of a single dominant cultural norm and the suppression of any differences, irrespective of whether these mark people out as members of other cultures or just as non-conformists. People can secede simply to permit cultural variety, for example in matters of religion.This would evidently be a quite different kind of case from that which we must now investigate, where a right to separate statehood is claimed for a group in virtue of the kind of group it is, irrespective of the circumstances in which it finds itself. Of most significance here will be those instances in which it is as supposedly forming a separate nation that a group claims a separate state, one type of ground for which would be that it has a separate culture which is both what makes it a nation and what justifies its right to separate statehood. It was national identity so conceived that shaped the principle of national self-determination, which was invoked to justify the numerous organised secessions that followed the First World War. One of the architects of that settlement, Woodrow Wilson, famously wrote that the ‘war had its roots in the disregard of the rights of small nations and of nationalities which lacked the union and the force to make good their claim to determine their own allegiances and their own forms of political life.’17 His recipe for preventing future wars turned on the notion that culturally defined nations had the right to separate states.18 It was in this atmosphere that partition occurred in Ireland, representing, as it did, acceptance of the view that there were in cultural terms two nations there, rather than one. Not that it should be thought that even in cultural terms this division was generally accepted – very many Irish Nationalists, as we saw in Chapter 3, held the view that Protestantism could be accommodated within a common Irish culture. Supposing, however, such demarcation questions were resolvable, how might separate cultural nationality generate a right of national secession? There are, as we also noticed in that earlier chapter, many ways in which cultural or ethnic nationalism might mount claims to separate 197


statehood. We can only look at a few of these here, and will confine ourselves, in this section, to involuntarist arguments – that is to say to those arguments that rely on a conception of the nation as constituted independently of its members’ desires to associate together in it. The general form of the argument will be that, other things being equal, it is desirable that separate cultures should fall under separate governments. A form of government which can result in a culture being irreparably damaged is, it is concluded, illegitimate and may therefore rightfully be repudiated through secession. It is, we should notice, legitimacy not freedom or justice, which is here thought of as what is gained by an act of secession; and the reason for this is that a government which does not show recognition and respect for one’s culture is held to have no good claim on one’s obedience. Where cultural nationalism differs from liberalism in most of its forms is that it denies that such recognition and respect can be adequately demonstrated within a system of individual cultural rights. It denies the public/private distinction on which such a liberal system is based and insists that culture is necessarily manifest in the public realm regulated by government. Acts of government thus have a tendency, hidden or overt, to foster a culture or to damage it. If the latter is the case, then the culture damaged is not being accorded suitable respect within the existing structures, so these may need to be changed. This general argument for a right of cultural secession can be fleshed out in many ways. The most obvious is simply to assert that there are many cases in which people’s cultures are so dissimilar that they cannot be governed together. This is the case often made for the partition of Ireland, and one repeated by Jinnah in his argument for partition in India.19 At its simplest this argument identifies people culturally in terms of such factors as religion or, more generally, values. These are taken to be exclusive, so that they generate systemically bounded groups. Such attachments or values are not, however, necessarily conflictual in the sense that they make social harmony impossible.20 Rather they supposedly render impossible a government which does not favour one set over the other. In a perhaps paranoid manifestation of this sort of view in Northern Ireland, it is the Church of Rome which is alleged to have ambitions to control the government of Ireland in order to eliminate Protestantism. Protestant culture, it is concluded, requires a separate government to protect it.21 There are many difficulties with this kind of argument, which is essentially a conservative one. It is, as we saw in Chapter 2, quite unclear that cultural groups of the kind required to generate a system 198


of separate states can, realistically, be identified. What we more commonly have are in fact ethnic groups, whose cultural differences are markers of ethnic boundaries.22 In that case the problems of shared government are only apparently located in the difficulties of governing together members of different cultures. In reality they have to do with the problems of governing in the interests of groups whose members do not perceive some common interest. Such considerations generate no obvious rights to separate statehood as against indicating its possible pragmatic advisability. Two further sorts of argument for a right of cultural secession may be discerned.The first attaches an intrinsic value to a culture, conceived as an integrated system of practices within which may be lived a life that is rich, harmonious and untroubled by doubt and difficulty.23 Such a culture is supposedly entitled to the protection of statehood, without which it could fall prey to alien influences that threaten its unity and complexity. It is, on this view, the duty of government to foster such a culture, and government gains its legitimacy precisely from fulfilling this duty, for government thereby demonstrates that it values what the members of the culture value and earns a right to their obedience in doing so. Superficially attractive as this picture is, it is again a profoundly conservative one, and one dominated by the functionalist model of culture examined and rejected earlier. Certainly it is an influential picture, gaining ground comparatively recently among the Protestant population of Northern Ireland who conceptualise their thrift, chapel-going and marching bands in terms of it.Yet why should a culture of this sort enjoy the protection of separate statehood? It might, to start with, not strike non-members as constituting a culture of any especial value anyway, with, perhaps, vices that outweigh its virtues. And if the anxiety is that without a separate state it would disappear then why would this be? Might it not be because its members themselves came freely to participate in a broader culture, rather than because they were somehow forced to abandon their old narrow one? It is quite unclear that there is any right to political institutions that tend to prevent this outcome. The second sort of argument views a culture as of instrumental value in terms of the benefits it brings to members. ‘In the last analysis,’ writes Stuart Hampshire, attributing such a view to Isaiah Berlin, ‘a sane nationalism is to be justified by a utilitarian argument – that most men and women are happy only when their way of life prolongs customs and habits which are familiar to them.’24 Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz have developed this line,25 arguing that individual 199


wellbeing depends upon participation in a culture which enshrines the shared expectations, traditions and conventions of such a life. It is a matter of fact, they believe, that people are organised into groups with such ‘pervasive cultures’, into what they call, as we noticed in Chapter 2, ‘encompassing groups’. Where an encompassing group forms a majority in a territory then it has the right to determine whether the territory shall be a separate state in order to safeguard its culture – a culture which crucially shapes its members’ identities. A government which denied that right would be illegitimate, it might be continued, because, in order to gain uncoerced obedience, it needs to govern people as subjects with culturally constituted identities able to recognise the government’s laws as their own. Once again, however, the model of culture that is operative here is open to criticism. In particular it is quite unclear that the cultures which are of special benefit to people or which do shape their identities are the sorts of culture that Margalit and Raz appeal to in defending a right of cultural secession, most especially supposedly national culture. The cultures that shape their identities in the sense of making them what they are may not be group cultures at all, or not the cultures of the restricted groups they take them to be. Thus outsiders constantly observe how much Protestants and Catholics throughout Ireland have in common culturally. Perhaps it is these common features which are most important to them and which might make possible shared government. If it is responded that this is not what both sides want, then we pass to a quite different set of arguments for a right of national secession. FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION

This contrasting type of argument for the right to secession identifies the kind of collectivity which has such a right as a group constituted by its members’ shared desire to be governed together and separately from others. The approach draws on a liberal theory of the right to freedom of association, including political association. As John Stuart Mill famously expressed it,‘one hardly knows what any division of the human race would be free to do if not to determine with which of the various collective bodies of human beings they would choose to associate themselves.’26 The theory may, as in Mill’s case, be linked to an identification of the collectivity that has this right as a nation, and we shall look at this position in a moment. Yet it need not be so, and in its most influential recent formulation by Harry Beran it is not so linked.27 Beran derives the right simply from the freedom of 200


individuals to determine their own relationships, so that it must be exercised in a manner that does not restrict that freedom for others. It is in this way that Beran aims to resolve the problem for voluntaristic accounts of self-determination, namely of how the area is chosen within which a plebiscite should be held to determine whether its inhabitants desire statehood. Beran’s answer is basically that would-be separatists may specify the area of the plebiscite for secession, while, if it is successful, any portion of this area may vote on whether it should remain part of the resulting secessionist state and so on recursively, subject to minimal requirements of viability. If such a procedure had been adopted in the partition of Ireland it would have produced a different resolution from that which we now see. The Sinn Fein negotiators who signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 did so in the expectation that the Boundary Commission for which the Treaty provided would allow nationalists in the Six Counties of the North to vote for incorporation into the Irish Free State.They were disappointed, with the result that Fermanagh,Tyrone and the city of Derry, which would have so voted, remained in a state from which they were denied a democratic exit.28 Had such a settlement been forthcoming it would have been harder than it now is for northern Nationalists to deny the legitimacy of the Northern Irish state. For the liberal theory of self-determination naturally goes together with the consent theory of political obligation which, in its simplest form, allows that those who do not consent to a certain state and lack the opportunity to secede have no obligations to it and hence cannot regard it as legitimate. If it is replied that political obligations to the state depend upon horizontal relationships of mutual obligation between its members, from which they cannot simply escape by secession, then it can be responded that while this may be true where there is a working political association it will not be so when those who seek secession are not treated as political associates but rather as a minority permanently excluded from effective political activity, as Northern Irish Catholics have been treated. The difficulty with this sort of response is that it threatens to reduce the scope of the right of secession, which Beran concedes very generally, to cases in which secessionists find themselves in politically disadvantageous circumstances.29 To escape this kind of difficulty the straightforward liberal argument for a right to secession can be linked to a liberal theory of nationality. Then it can be maintained that it is because people form a nation that they have a right to secede and that their forming a nation is, in the sort of way discussed in Chapter 3, 201


dependent upon their wanting to associate together. Then their right to statehood transcends their circumstances, for the horizontal relationships which give rise to obligations to that state are, supposedly, those of shared nationality. A state’s legitimacy depends, broadly speaking, upon its correspondence to an association of fellow nationals.30 Such an association can be viewed in different ways, either as by itself constituting people into a nation, or as formed by them because of certain common characteristics which are also necessary for shared nationhood. In the first kind of account the reasons for the association that constitutes people into a nation are basically irrelevant,31 though the reasons are likely to be that they have common interests which would be furthered by membership of the state. Yet while a liberal defence of a right to secession from the principle of free association may seem beguiling in the abstract, surely it is much less so in cases where the association patently exists to further common interests, especially if this is at the expense of others. I suggest that we would tend to think of such an association as having a right of secession only if there were some good reason for it to have political institutions which furthered its interests. This version of the liberal account fails to demonstrate what such a reason might be. It then becomes particularly vulnerable to criticisms of the Marxist variety, for example that Ulster Unionist claims of a distinct nationality from the rest of the Irish population are a sham, disguising what were, until recently, the sharply contrasting interests of the heavily capitalised North by comparison with those of the rural South.32 It seems that any plausible justification for national secession will have to draw on more resources than those that a bare liberal voluntarism can provide. The second kind of account aims to provide these reasons, and to do so, in particular, by regarding the nation as a cultural association, in which people wish to join together politically because they have a common culture. This may well have been the conception that Mill had in mind, and recently it has been canvassed by Yael Tamir.33 One of its advantages is that it suggests a solution to the problem noted in Chapter 2 of how cultures might be delimited in a way that picks out cultural groups and can thus interpret cultural identities as the membership of such groups. This is necessary if nationality is to be thought of as a form of cultural identity, since nationality needs to be a characteristic which classifies people into systemically bounded groups. According to the cultural associationist view of nations, this requirement can be met by identifying a national culture as that collection of characteristics which people take themselves to share and on the 202


basis of which they wish to associate politically. They are the cultural characteristics which form, so to speak, the focus of the association. In practice, however, it is quite unclear that a suitable set of cultural characteristics identified by all its members as marking out the cultural association can be discovered. It is more likely, as we noticed in Chapter 1, that whatever cultural characteristics come most readily to hand are seized upon as those that mark out what is, in fact, an ethnic rather than a cultural group. In the case of Ulster Unionists, for instance, the culture around which they associate is fluid, capable of preserving the same contours for the group even when its cultural content is identified differently or changes, with, for example, a fallingoff of religious observance and an increased emphasis on Orange parades.34 Where this sort of phenomenon occurs, the case for a right of secession for a nation conceived of as a cultural association is greatly weakened. For this case is stronger than that of the purely associative one only to the extent that it actually identifies a worthy motive for the association.Yet the use of culture simply to mark out an ethnic group is inherently exclusionary; so why does focusing upon a common culture furnish a worthy motive for association in such a case? What would need to be demonstrated would be that the exclusions involved might serve some common good. The belief that they do seems generally to be based upon the assumption that cultural cohesion is needed for people to form an effective community whose members have horizontal relationships which can generate the political obligations needed for shared statehood.Yet this just takes us back to the sort of conservative argument looked at earlier. Throughout this section we have treated the wish to associate and the fact of association as coincident.Yet they are not: people may wish to associate and yet find they fail to do so, fail, we may say, to build a community out of their wish for one, whether or not they realise their failure. Conversely, people can actually have the kind of communal relations which generate political obligations but fail to grasp the basis for them and form instead an association that focuses upon factors which are irrelevant to the facts of their community, as narrowly focussed cultural associations may be. It would seem utterly perverse to privilege people’s wishes, based, as in these cases, on quite mistaken beliefs, over the facts of their association.Yet liberal principles accord rights in order to further people’s opportunities to do what they want, however misguided. One might reason with them, but in the last resort the liberal must abide by their decisions. The effects on the international order of doing so may, however, be disastrous, and institutional 203


morality must take account of this. It must, that is to say, decline to privilege people’s wishes over the facts concerning a desirable world order. I conclude that no cogent arguments can be mustered for a right of national self-determination and possible secession from liberal principles of freedom of association. THE NATIONAL COMMUNITY

If nations are communities, albeit ‘imagined’ ones, then the best argument for national self-determination may be that communities have the right to administer their own affairs. Because communities are groups living a common life whose members’ shared purpose is pursuit of the common good, it might be argued, they have a right to institutions in which they and they alone can participate in order to realise this good, for no other institutions are so likely to achieve it as these. Here the idea of community that is operative in grounding the right can be divorced from any conception of common culture, though there will have to be whatever commonality of culture is needed for a shared purpose to be pursued. This concession goes nowhere, however, towards accepting the mistaken assumption that a common culture, independently understood, somehow generates a community.35 Evidently it does not, as the right material basis for communal relations may be lacking. Furthermore it is, as I indicated a moment ago, quite possible for people to be mistaken about the existence of their community because they wrongly believe that communal relations are present when they are not, or about its nature because the purposes they set themselves reflectively are narrower than those their lives among others make manifest. Suppose for the moment, then, that we grant the communitarian defence of national self-determination: how might we count communities for the purposes of discerning which groups of people have the right to self-determination? How many such communities are there, to take a concrete example, in the North of Ireland? It has become commonplace to speak of there being two communities: Protestants and Catholics, or Loyalists and Nationalists, thought of as having, in Kearney’s words, ‘opposing national and cultural identities . . . together with conflicting aspirations.’36 But another answer is that there is just one, both Protestants and Catholics thought of as combining into a single community, and that, perhaps, not distinct from the community composed of all those living in the island of Ireland. The different answers are both to be found in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement on 204


the constitutional future of Ireland,37 incompatible as they would seem to be, the text of the Agreement constantly vacillating between them. No doubt this represents a diplomatic necessity given disagreement between the parties to the Agreement about how to count the relevant communities, a disagreement rooted in philosophical differences as to what makes people a community, of the sort that we examined in Chapter 5.What kinds of criterion for communal identity might be offered? The first criterion, which picks up one of the strains in civic nationalism, is that the relevant communities are those groups already organised politically for their common good. Political communities have rights of self-determination, runs one version of this approach, because their political organisation, perhaps in opposition to oppression, shows that they really can work together as a community for a shared purpose.38 How might this be applied to Ireland? Not easily, we must conclude, for though prior to partition there arguably was a single political community, nevertheless it failed to incorporate Ulster Protestants into its ranks in its drive for independence. It would, however, be wrong to conclude from the bare fact that there is a Northern Irish state that this represents a single political community either. For the mere existence of a state does nothing to show that its citizens make up a single community, prepared to act for a shared political purpose. Indeed, Northern Catholics are not for the most part prepared to act in concert with Protestants within the exclusive confines of a Northern Irish state. A second approach identifies what are thought of as historic communities, that is to say groups whose communal interdependencies can be recognised as having persisted over time and are recognised as such by their participants.39 By this criterion Northern Ireland cannot sensibly be counted as a community, since it lacks a history except as a part of Ireland as a whole.The whole of Ireland has a more plausible claim to being a single community on this criterion, but can a common history really evince a common purpose? It is hard to see why it should, and one may suspect that only a covert idealism might lead one to assume it. If there has been a shared purpose in Ireland despite the manifest conflicts, then this must have more to do, one might suggest, with geography than with history. For geography furnishes a third criterion of community, in terms of which people who lead economically interdependent lives, reliant on the resources of the same place, count as a single community because they must willy-nilly share a common purpose in living there together as well as possible. This, which is, as we have seen, the republican conception of 205


community, can only be applied to Ireland as a whole on the most optimistic assumptions, given its history of conflict and exploitation. Perhaps there has at times been such an Irish community, and republicans are keen to stress such episodes of commonality. But the record for the country as a whole is not much more encouraging than that for the North alone, where shared habitation has produced at best uneasy local accommodations.Yet it would be wrong to recoil from this criterion to a fourth, ethnic one, settling for a count of two communities. For this criterion which identifies people as a community only when they enjoy the full range of relationships made possible by shared social norms can be sustained only by imposing too stringent a test of what is to count as a common life. Thus it just is not the case that the lives of Protestants and of Catholics are separable in a way that makes it plausible to speak of two communities: too much of the lives of each group intersects with and depends upon the lives of the other. Perhaps the answer to the question of how many communities there are in Northern Ireland is simply ‘none’. There is a much more general point to be made here. It is that there is no clear and uncontentious way to delimit the communities that might be candidates for a right of national self-determination. No single criterion may be agreed upon and even when a single criterion is offered there can be disagreement on how it should be applied and therefore on what communities ought to be identified. Nations cannot be merely imagined communities, in the sense that material facts about the actual relationships within them and the objectives that they evince are quite irrelevant to judgements about whether they exist as communities or only as nationalistic pipe-dreams. Material facts are relevant. It is just that they yield no way of identifying a system of national communities. Perhaps they might have done, but reality is too resistant. The mixtures of conflict and cohesion, the varieties and levels of social organisation, the complex interactions between people’s real relationships and their perceptions of them – all this and more renders it quite implausible to suppose that a system of national communities could be identified corresponding to some possible system of legitimate states.Yet because states do form a system, and national self-determination posits a right to them for collectivities of a certain kind, nothing less than such a systematic identification of nations would be adequate if the right is to be allowed. My conclusion is that there is no way of making out such a right.The idea that there is one may be no more than an aspect of the ideology which seeks to legitimise particular state structures. But in the specific 206


circumstances of individual states the way the ideology is applied may be quite different, now drawing on involuntarist cultural considerations, now on civic associationist ones, now on some story of a national community and so forth. Once generated to legitimise established states, these different arguments for national self-determination can be appropriated by non-state groups and used to further claims for secession. How should we react to them? All we can safely say, it seems to me, is that we must view them pragmatically, without the assurance of being able to rely upon general principles of justice which will allow like cases to be treated similarly. For even when two groups put up the same kind of case for secession the circumstances that surround their situations may be different. One group may be sufficiently powerful and determined to create intolerable conflict if their claim is rejected. Another may not, and the damage their secession might do to others would outweigh the limited disruption they might cause. One group may, independently of the secessionist case it mounts, be the actual or potential victim of oppression; another may by contrast seek to oppress, and so on. The kinds of case mounted can differ too in their moral complexions, even if none are decisive. Some, often regrettably the most potent in gaining popular support, are the least meritorious. Where possible, political arrangements should be made that avoid giving encouragement to such sorts of separatism, for example ethnic ones, and above all such situations need to be viewed in terms of their impact upon the ordinary people who are involved. Pragmatism is not the prerogative only of statesmen concerned with the stability of the state system. It is also the common prudence of their subjects, struggling to lead their lives as best they can and to see their situation clearly, mistrustful of the discourses of power in terms of which the grander sorts of claim are couched. NOTES 1. UN Covenants on Human Rights, Human Rights in International Law (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1985), pp. 15, 27. 2. Cp. D. George, ‘The ethics of national self-determination’, in P. Gilbert and P. Gregory (eds), Nations, Cultures and Markets (Aldershot: Avebury, 1994), pp. 68–9. 3. Charter of the United Nations (New York: United Nations, 1989), p. 3. 4. See H.Wilson, International Law and the Use of Force by National Liberation Movements (Oxford: OUP, 1988), pp. 65–70.

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5. See N. Mansergh, The Unresolved Question (New Haven: Yale UP, 1991), pp. 116–18. 6. See J. McGarry and B. O’Leary, Explaining Northern Ireland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 41. 7. See A. Cassese,‘The self-determination of peoples’ in L. Henkin (ed.), The International Bill of Rights (New York: Columbia UP, 1981). 8. See H. Beran,‘Who should be entitled to vote in self-determination referenda?’, in M. Warner and R. Crisp (eds), Terrorism, Protest and Power (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1990). 9. See Mansergh, Unresolved Question, pp. 52–3. 10. For example David Copp,‘Democracy and communal self-determination’, in R. McKim and J. McMahan (eds), The Morality of Nationalism (New York: OUP, 1997), p. 281. 11. Pace A. Buchanan, ‘Secession and nationalism’, in R. E. Goodin and P. Pettit (eds), A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 586–9. 12. A. Buchanan, ‘The international institutional dimension of secession’, in P. Lehning (ed.), Theories of Secession (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 227–9. David Miller disputes Buchanan’s approach, arguing that we need a theory of secession to guide our thinking about cases, not just to allow us to formulate an international legal system. But if this is a comprehensive and coherent theory, then it is hard to see why the two sets of considerations should come apart, since in thinking about particular cases of secession we would need to consider the consequences of others doing likewise. Of course there may be no such theory to be had, in which case it is not clear that we could speak of rights at all, as against justifications in particular cases. See D. Miller,‘Secession and the principle of nationality’, in M. Moore (ed.), National Self-Determination and Secession (Oxford: OUP, 1998), esp. pp. 63–5. 13. Pace Buchanan, who advocates what he calls ‘minimal realism’ – restricting proposals to those with ‘a significant prospect of being adopted in the foreseeable future’. See Buchanan, ‘The international institutional dimension of secession’, p. 237. Cp. Kai Nielson,‘Liberal nationalism and secession’, in Moore, National Self-Determination and Secession, pp. 128–32. 14. A. Buchanan, Secession (Boulder:Westview, 1991), pp. 27–81. 15. This is Buchanan’s position in ‘Self-determination, secession, and the rule of law’, in McKim and McMahan, Morality of Nationalism. In ‘The international institutional dimension of secession’, however, he omits this third right, while, as we shall see, in Secession itself he additionally appears to allow some cases of cultural protection as generating a right of secession. It is not clear whether this represents a progressive tightening of Buchanan’s view. 16. Buchanan, Secession, p. 60. 17. W. Wilson, ‘Self-determination as the basis for peace’, in A. Zimmern (ed.), Modern Political Doctrines (London: OUP, 1939), p. 223.

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18. See E. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: CUP, 1990), pp. 130–6. 19. See N. Mansergh, The Commonwealth Experience (London:Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969), pp. 305–6. 20. As I wrongly suggest in The Philosophy of Nationalism (Boulder: Westview, 1998), p. 147. 21. See J. D. Cash, Identity, Ideology and Conflict (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), ch. 4. 22. For this interpretation of the Northern Ireland conflict, see McGarry and O’Leary, Explaining Northern Ireland, chs 5 and 6. 23. For this kind of account see D. Bell, Communitarianism and its Critics (Oxford: OUP, 1993), ch. 4. 24. S. Hampshire, ‘Nationalism’, in E. and A. Margalit (eds), Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration (London: Hogarth Press, 1991), p. 128. 25. A. Margalit and J. Raz, ‘National self-determination’, in W. Kymlicka (ed.), The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: OUP, 1995). 26. J. S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government [1861], ch. 16. 27. See, for example, H. Beran, ‘A democratic theory of political self-determination for a new world order’, in Lehning, Theories of Secession. 28. See Mansergh, Unresolved Question, ch. 10. 29. The response would not have authorised the secession of Ulster if, as is plausible, the Protestant people had obligations to their Catholic fellowcountrymen, who had been ready to treat them as political associates. 30. Complications have to be introduced for cases where a nation opts to stay in a multicultural state, which is thereby legitimised. 31. So long as they do not depend upon their temporary circumstances, but on what makes them a certain kind of group. 32. See McGarry and O’Leary, Explaining Northern Ireland, ch. 2. 33. Y.Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993). 34. See McGarry and O’Leary, Explaining Northern Ireland, pp. 355–8. 35. An assumption betrayed in the constant slide from talk of common culture to talk of shared community in authors like Tamir: see Tamir, Liberal Nationalism, esp. ch. 2. 36. R. Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 71. 37. Concluded on 10 April 1998 through multi-party negotiations in Belfast and ratified by referendums in both parts of Ireland. 38. Cp. M.Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic, 1992), ch. 6. 39. Cp. Bell, Communitarianism, ch. 4.

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qw

The post-Cold War world is a place of violent ethnic conflict and contested national boundaries. What peoples there are and how they should be recognised politically are questions of immediate political concern. But they are questions whose answers will reflect, even when they are not explicitly informed by, philosophical views about collective identities and their ethical implications for political organisation. The aim of this book has been to expose some of these views and to exemplify how they are relevant to contemporary political issues. It has not, however, advanced a systematic theory from which, together with the facts about the identities involved, solutions to these problems can be read off. Indeed it has expressed scepticism at the possibility of such a theory. One reason for this stems, as I have attempted to illustrate, from the cultural specificity of the leading theories.The various versions of liberalism and communitarianism, for example, arose in particular historical circumstances and may not be transferrable to contemporary ones for at least two kinds of reason. First, though they may command credence among those in the West whose histories contributed to their formation, there is no reason to think that they will be viewed as anything other than alien impositions by those with different histories and traditions. Yet it is precisely to counter alien impositions that political recognition of distinct collective identities is sought. Second, there is no reason to think that the kinds of collective identity to which the classical theories are relevant are those that now prevail, and thus no grounds for confidence that the claims of contemporary collective identities can be adequately addressed by them. So much for scepticism. This second point is, however, related to 210

CONCLUSION

one of the book’s polemical themes. It is that the dominant AngloAmerican approaches, both liberal and communitarian, are pervaded by a groundless and mystificatory functionalism about culture. Functionalism contributes to the idea that the possession of collective identities based on membership of cultural groups is a recurrent feature of human life, a feature, indeed, necessary to a meaningful moral existence and, for that reason, to be safeguarded.What changes, according to this picture, is only the sort of group of which cultural identity connotes membership, from the primitive tribe to the modern nation. Although kinship ties in the latter are less close and less overtly constitutive of membership than in the former, a common ethnicity is still a natural corollary of cultural identity according to this view. Thus, while the racist excesses of ethnic identification may be condemned, it is itself seen as at worst a morally neutral characteristic of groups claiming political recognition. It is, perhaps, to be tempered by the widening of allegiance prescribed by a progressive modernism, but not itself to be regarded as a phenomenon that politics should, or even could, oppose as an obstacle to peace and a just political order.1 The facts, we are suggesting, and the moral judgements consequent upon them are quite different.The mistake is, in Fredrik Barth’s words, to postulate ‘a world of separate peoples, each with their own culture and each organised in a society which can legitimately be isolated for description as an island to itself ’.2 Yet, as we have seen, the separateness of people is to a large extent an artefact of processes of categorisation and group identification in which cultural markers are selected to establish and maintain the boundaries of ethnicity and nationality. There are, to be sure, other criteria of collective identity, for example territorial criteria. Yet these increasingly take second place to ethnic or ethno-national criteria as territory is seen as that to which nonterritorially individuated groups lay claim, rather than that whose common occupation forms a group.Whereas, I have argued, the moral claims of territorial groups to political recognition can be strong, ethnicity in itself not only has no moral standing, its necessary exclusivity is morally repugnant, a source of conflict and a bar to co-operation in facing up to a common fate. The reason to entertain the claims of ethnic groups lies not in their basis in ethnicity or common culture but in the fact that these are the identifications that people make of themselves and sometimes for good reason.To categorise them differently is of itself oppressive. Yet recognition should be given to ethnic or ethno-national groups in political arrangements only with the greatest caution, and in the 211


light both of the particular circumstances the group involved is in and of the results of recognising it. The recognition of the secession of ethno-national groups in the Balkans, for instance, illustrates the danger of doing otherwise. These secessions unleashed disorder and violence whose unconsidered consequences continue to ramify. Nor is it obvious that international recognition of Slovenia and Croatia, which precipitated the break-up of Yugoslavia, took adequate account of their situation or motives for secession. They were, to be sure, menaced by the rumblings of a resurgent Serbian nationalism. But they were also the most economically advanced parts of Yugoslavia with much to gain from independence, not victims of exclusion and oppression. An analogous ethnic group that was, by contrast, a victim of such treatment would have had from these circumstances, I have argued, a good case for governmental secession. But nothing can be inferred from this about exactly what political arrangements should be made for similar kinds of group in other situations.The ethnic self-identification of an excluded and oppressed people is understandable and may even be necessary for their emancipation. Yet it still produces a potentially dangerous form of collectivity. Not the least of the objectives of liberating it should therefore be the removal of those circumstances that give it this form in the first place. More generally, political arrangements should seek to minimise the scope for such identifications and the motivation for them. Republicanism, with its territorial mode of identification, aims to do just this. In the present day it comes up against the ethnic selfidentifications of marginalised groups within established states that have aspirations to a republican politics. Perhaps, I suggested pessimistically in Chapter 5, republicanism, for all its virtues, cannot survive these post-Enlightenment developments. If it is to do so, however, it can only be through the break-up of existing unitary nation-states into federations of smaller units where previously marginalised groups become the dominant ones and can enjoy the protection afforded by regional autonomy.3 These principles, though not, lamentably, their practice, in the old Soviet system described in Chapter 8 have much to commend them, assuming they are detached from the attribution of personal nationality. Even then, though, there are manifest dangers, most obviously of reproducing at a more local level the exclusion and oppression that devolution seeks to mitigate. The character of the group is, I have suggested, relevant here. An oppressed people moved by a desire for justice has a moral basis for its claims that a group merely frustrated in its self-aggrandisement evidently does not, pragmatically 212

CONCLUSION

imperative to placate it as it may be. Even more local or diffuse forms of empowerment than regional autonomy may be necessary to deal with territorially dispersed minorities. Here too, though, the AustroMarxist nostrum of ethnic group representation,4 recently revived by Iris Marion Young, should be resisted. Even these sketchy suggestions may cause apprehensions among those who share the author’s concern for a politics aimed principally at emancipation and collective control of common life.The first is that the ethical contents of the judgements about the political arrangements required to achieve these ends are themselves ineluctably culturespecific, and thus fall prey to the sceptical doubts we started with. To some extent this is true and we cannot, of course, escape our own cultural traditions to occupy some Archimedean point of judgmental universality. But it is true only to an extent. There are objective tests of whether people are victims of discrimination and oppression. It requires no specific conceptions of justice or freedom to discern their unnecessary suffering and lack of capacity to rectify it. It is because republicanism is initially founded upon such objective measures of justice and freedom, which are only later refined into more specific communal conceptions, that a republican politics escapes the full force of the objection against cultural imperialism, as Sultan-Galiev’s doomed Muslim republic illustrates. It is, furthermore, by such objective measures that the character of particular ethnic groups is to be judged. For no cultural arrogance is involved in judging harshly those who are by these measures oppressive and unjust. A second apprehension concerns the lack of protection for cultures apparently implied by a refusal to recognise the rights of culturally identified ethnic groups.What is more, this book’s attack on functionalism may be interpreted as downplaying the importance of culture altogether, and its preparedness to judge of the relative values of cultures as evincing inadequate respect for cultural distinctiveness.These would be grave charges indeed.The outline of an answer must start from two premises: first, that people should have collective control over their own culture; second, that such control does not normally require political institutions, though control of political institutions may be needed to remove obstacles to collective cultural control. Of course culture is of vital importance to people’s grasp on reality and capacity to deal with it together.What threatens it, though, is loss of collective control over its expression and evolution. Cultural protection should serve to establish the conditions for such control. But its politicisation threatens both to place culture under sectional control and to press it 213


into service for the maintenance of power, rather than for the illumination of life. People can control their own culture without forming a bounded cultural group: they simply participate in it and contribute to it freely and on an equal footing. This is, one might say, the norm from which culturally identified groups with their political agendas are a deviation, a deviation which, far from necessarily protecting what is valuable in cultures, may well freeze and debilitate them. What is of distinctive value in cultures is not what is thus frozen in processes of boundary-marking and stereotyping, but what people have developed as their own viewpoint on the world.That this should not be interfered with by others through imperialising cultural contacts needs no defence from functionalism or cultural relativism. Nor can such theoretical stances provide any satisfactory general formula for ensuring that what people should get here is what they do get, not least because they cannot determine how local the level is at which people should retain what is distinctive about themselves culturally. The conclusion of this book might, on the one hand, be read as postmodernist, seeking to deconstruct the collective identities upon which the grand narratives of Western political philosophy erect their justifications for the political status quo, and to substitute a more complex picture of human interrelations for which no single pattern of political organisation is adequate. Each situation must be coped with by those involved without such preconceptions, though this is not to say without some conception of what is just and liberatory. On the other hand, however, the book resists a pessimistic relativism about these notions, suggesting that they can be founded on objective facts about human needs and social harmony, the recognition of which can ground resistance to unjust and unfree political orders. It is, therefore, people, not peoples, who are in the end the objects of philosophical interest and political concern.That they identify themselves as peoples in the way they do is not an inescapable consequence of their humanity, but it can reflect their differing searches for freedom and justice – some, as we have seen, more likely to succeed than others. NOTES 1. This thesis goes further than Jeremy Waldron, ‘Minority cultures and the cosmopolitan alternative’, in W. Kymlicka (ed.), The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: OUP, 1995). For Waldron regards the parcelling up of the social world into distinct group cultures as simply factually mistaken, while I regard the view that they are so parcelled up as dangerous precisely

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because people increasingly do so identify themselves – for no good reason but with disastrous political consequences. 2. F. Barth, ‘Ethnic groups and boundaries’, in his Process and Form in Social Life (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 200. Rogers Brubaker terms this mistake ‘groupism’ in his ‘Myths and misconceptions in the study of nationalism’, in J. A. Hall (ed.), The State of the Nation (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), esp. pp. 292–8. 3. There is no space to defend the suggestion here. But for a pessimistic assessment of it see W. Kymlicka, ‘Is federalism a viable alternative to secession?’ in P. Lehning (ed.), Theories of Secession (London: Routledge, 1998). 4. See B. Jenkins and G. Minnerup, Citizens and Comrades (London: Pluto Press, 1984), pp. 26–7.

215

INDEX

qw

Achebe, Chinua, 14–15 Act of Union (1801), 191 aesthetic productions, 42 ‘affaire du foularde islamique’, 110–11 Africa/Africans, 9, 15, 19 Afro-Cuban music, 51 Ahmad, Aijaz, 138–9 Alcoff, L. M., 30n Algeria, 191 Alter, P., 76n Althusser, Louis, 129–30, 131, 132 altruism, kin, 154 America see United States ancient Greece, 101 Anderson, Benedict, 64, 65–6, 67 Anglo-Irish nation and, 67 see also Ireland; Ulster Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921), 201 anti-dominative ethnic groups, 29 ‘anti-productivism’, 47 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 19 archaeology, 131 Archard, D., 121n Ardrey, Robert, 165n Aristotle, 101–3, 104–5 Arminius, 84 Arnold, Matthew, 34, 42, 43

assimilation, 109–13, 170–4 association freedom of, 200–4 political, 150–4 Audard, Catherine, 121n Aurelius, Marcus, 79–80, 99n Australian Aboriginals, 50 authenticity, history and, 48–51 autonomy, 91–8, 164, 178–9 definition of, 91 toleration and, 175 aversive racism, 15 Balibar, Etienne, 73, 109 Balkans, 212 Barber, Benjamin, 121n Barth, Fredrik, 22, 211 Bauman, Z., 144n Beitz, Charles, 82 Benn, Stanley, 97 Beran, Harry, 200, 201 Berlin, Isaiah, 97, 199 Bhabha, Homi, 136–8 bifurcationism, integrationism as, 171 biological categories, 11 biological organisms, 36 ‘black’, as category, 18 ‘Black Atlantic’ identity, 47

216

INDEX

black consciousness, 19 blackness, 18–19 ‘bond of justice’, 106 Boundary Commission, Anglo-Irish Treaty, 201 Bourdieu, Pierre, 45 Brazil, racial categorisation in, 20 Brennan,Timothy, 51 British rule, in Ireland, 69 Brubaker, Rogers, 185, 186n, 215n Buchanan, Alan, 194–6, 208n Burke, Edmund, 85 Bush Negro art, 50 Butler, Judith, 81 Calhoun, C., 55n Caney, S., 164n capitalism/capitalists, 123–7 global, 125 post-Cold War, 80 Catholics, 192 The Celts (Delaney), 55n Césaire, Aimé, 19 Chamberlain, M. E., 30n character, formation of, 47 Chatterjee, Partha, 135–6 Chicano nationalism, 159 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) US, 155 Christianity, 114 Chrysippus, 99n Cicero, 105–6, 113 citizenship, 57, 58, 147–64 inter-cultural, 163 republican tradition of, 158 world, 149 The City of God (St Augustine), 113–16 city, allegiance to, 117 civic nationalism, 69–70 civic nationhood, 67–70 civilisation, 35 ‘claim of community’ thesis, 104 Clermont-Tonnerre, 108 clubs, 150 Cohen, A. P., 31n, 55n Cohen, J., 98n colonies, revolt in, 126 colonisation, 15 colonists, American, 161 common culture

ethnic groups and, 23 political recognition and, 28 common goals, 65 common good, republicanism and, 160 ‘common good’ thesis, 102 common interests political recognition and, 28 state membership and, 202 ‘common sense of right’, 106 Communist Manifesto (Marx & Engels), 123, 125 Communist Party, Muslim section of, 174 communitarianism, 101–20 cultural, 113–17 communities, 72, 101–5, 116 in Northern Ireland, 204 confessional criterion, 115 conflict theory, 38–41 Connor,Walker, 186n Conrad, Joseph, 9, 14, 17, 24, 29 conservatism, 82–6 nationalism and, 172 Constant, Benjamin, 121n constitution, of US, 150–2 constitutionalism, contemporary, 163 construction, of social groups, 38 contemporary constitutionalism, 163 Copp, David, 208n Cornish language, 43 cosmopolitanism, 79–82, 141, 142 Cox, O. C., 30n Croatian language, 40 Cuba, 51 cultural assimilation, 176 cultural communitarianism, 113–17, 172 cultural hybridity, 138 cultural identity, 32–54 cultural nationalism, 67, 69, 117–20 cultural relativism, 46 cultural rights, 167–70 cultural separation, 182–6, 197–200 cultural transformation, 111 culture, 32–5 definition of, 33–4 ethnic groups and, 23 group constructionism, 39 political recognition and, 28

217

INDEX

self-written, 51 D’Encausse, Hélène Carrère, 186n Dark, Philip J. C., 50 Davis, H. B., 143n De Republica (Cicero), 105–6, 113 Declaration of Independence, USA, 152, 162 Delaney, F., 55n Derrida, Jacques, 138 dialects, 40 dialogic community, 81–2, 113 diaspora, 179–80 identities, 52 difference, politics of, 2, 177–8 discrimination, ethnic identification and, 159 discriminatory redistribution, 196 dominative racism, 15, 28–9 Dower, N., 165n Druidism, 49 Durkheim, Emile, 36–7 Eagleton,Terry, 15, 67 eastern nationalisms, 67 economies planned, 181 unfairness, 196 education, 2, 111 Eisteddfodau, 49 ‘embedded individual’ thesis, 102 England and Irish suppression, 57 sixteenth-century, 59 Enlightenment, 82, 142, 178 liberalism, 90–4 taxonomies of, 17 thinkers, 80 epiphenomenon, ideology as, 128 Ervine, John, 64 ‘ethical communitarian’ thesis, 103–4 ethnic conceptions, of nationhood, 67 ethnic groups, 213 anti-dominative, 29 non-reactive, 27 political recognition and, 27–9 reactive, 28 ethnic identification, 159 ethnic mixing, 119–20

ethnic nationalism, 71–4, 142, 211–12 ethnic nationhood, 71–4 ethnicity, 21–3, 211 fictive, 73 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 54n fabrication, nations as, 66 false consciousness, 128 family model, 154–7 Fanon, Frantz, 137 fatalism, 47 feminism, 135 Festenstein, Matthew, 55n, 99n Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 85, 117 fictive ethnicity, 73 Fifteenth Amendment, 155 Five Civilised Tribes, 162 Foucault, Michel, 17, 131–5 Fourteenth Amendment, 155 France Algeria and, 191 Muslim headscarves and, 110–11 fraternity, 65 freedom, 3, 89 of association, 200–4 individual, 180 French Revolution, 59, 108 Freud, Sigmund, 140–1 Friedrich, Carl J., 121n Friel, Brian, 62 functionalism, 35–8, 167, 211 Gaelic, 64 ethnicism, 68, 70 tradition, 73 Galiev, Sultan, 174, 213 Geertz, C., 24 Gellner, Ernest, 58–9, 66 Gemeinschaft, 72, 116 genealogy, 131 general will, 108 genetic differences, 11 geographical location, 10 George III, 162 Gesellschaft, 72, 116 Gibson, G. D., 55n Gilbert, P., 75n Gilroy, Paul, 19, 47 global capitalism, 125

218

INDEX

goals, common, 65 Goldberg, David, 17 Goldsmith, Oliver, 83 Good Friday Agreement (1998), 204–5 governmental secession, 194 Gramsci, Antonio, 128, 134, 143n Gray, John, 95 Greece, ancient, 101 Greenfeld, Liah, 59 ‘group-conscious’ policies, 184 group construction, culture in, 39 group cultures, 33, 97 group identities, 17–21, 140–2 Enlightenment Liberalism and, 93 Guibernau, M., 143n Habermas, Jürgen, 81–2, 113 habitus, 45, 47 Hall, Stuart, 52, 129 Hampshire, Stuart, 199 Hastings, Adrian, 75n Heaney, Seamus, 75n Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 9, 15 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 58, 75n, 125 hegemony, 129, 134, 135, 137 white, 16 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 35, 97, 117, 154 Hewitt, John, 61, 63, 75n Hispanics, 22 as category, 17 in USA, 17–18 historic communities, 205 history, authenticity and, 48–51 Hobbes,Thomas, 174 Hobsbawm, E., 49, 59 Holland, revolt in, 87 Home Rule Bill (1912), 193 A House for Mr Biswas (Naipaul), 32, 41, 50 human rights, 189 violations of, 195–6 Hume, David, 156 Hutchinson, John, 69, 70 hybridity, 51–4, 138 identities ‘Black Atlantic’, 47

cultural, 32–54 diaspora, 52 group, 140–2 national, 57–74, 151 postmodern, 139–42 symbolic order and, 141 Ideological State Apparatus, 130, 132 ideology, 127–31 racial categorisation and, 12 ‘imagined community’, nation as, 64 immigrant groups, 179 immigration, 118, 147–64 India, partition and, 135–6, 198 Indian Allotment Act (1881), 162 Indian Reorganisation Act (1934), 161 indigenous music, 51 indigenous peoples, 147–64, 179 indigenous rights, 161–4 instrumental value of culture, 199 instrumentalism, 23–6 integration, 84, 111, 170–4 theory, 35–8 inter-cultural citizens, 163 interpellation, 130 intrinsic value, of culture, 199 involuntarist arguments, 198 Ireland, 57–74 self-determination and, 189–207 Irish Free State, 193 Jacobs, J. M., 55 Jenkins, R., 23, 25 Jennings, Jeremy, 121n Jews, 108, 179–80 Jinnah (Muslim leader), 135, 198 Johnson, Albert, 155 Johnson, Dr, 109 jurisdiction, unjust loss of, 195 justice, 3, 90, 113–14 bond of, 106 Kant, Immanuel, 80, 81, 91, 92 Kautsky, Karl, 143n kin altruism, 154 ‘Know-Nothings’, 152 Kohn, Hans, 76n Kristeva, Julia, 140–2 Kukathas, Chandran, 99n, 175–6, 177, 178

219

INDEX

Kymlicka,Will, 34, 37–8, 54n, 55n, 94, 112, 161, 166n, 178–81, 214n, 215n Lacan, Jacques, 140 Laclau, Ernesto, 130 land, right to own, 61, 161–2 language, 41–4, 111 cultural groupings as, 169 culture and, 178–9 Spanish, 159 Lea, D. R., 75n Lee, D., 54n legal rights, 194–5 Lenin,Vladimir Ilyich, 126 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 33, 35 liberalism, 175–6 enlightenment, 90–4 reformation, 86–90 lifeboat model, 119, 157 Lincoln, Abraham, 92 linguistic categories, 10 and self-government, 44 Linklater, A., 98n Livingstone, Dr, 15 Locke, John, 61, 150–1, 161–2 Lockwood, David, 54n Loomba, Ania, 30n Luhmann, Niklas, 54n MacIntyre, Alisdair, 121n Malik, Kenan, 16 Mansergh, N., 109n Margalit, Avishai, 37, 199–200 Marshall,T. H., 165n Marx/Marxism, 16, 40, 81, 123, 202 critique, 123–7 postmodernism and, 123–42 Mazzini, 125 Meinecke, Friedrich, 76n ‘mélange’, 52, 53 membership, of state, 147–50 Mexicans, 159 Miles, Robert, 12, 128 Mill, John Stuart, 200, 202 Miller, David, 84, 118–20, 156–7, 165n, 184, 208n millet model, 182–4 Mills, Charles, 16

Milton, John, 87 ‘minimal realism’, 208n minority cultures, 88 minority rights, 37 Mobutu, General, 50 modernism, 23 primordialism and, 24 moral rights, 194 moral standards, 45 morality, 96 Morgan, D. P., 64 mulatto, as category, 17 Mulhall, S., 121n multiculturalism, 167–86 music Afro-Cuban, 51 carnivalistic, 47 Muslims in Communist Party, 174 headscarves, France, 110–11 as minorities, 183 mutual concern, 65 myth, 49 Naipaul,V. S., 32, 41, 50, 144n Nairn,Tom, 75n names, ethnic groups and, 22 national community, 63–7, 204–7 national consciousness, 59 national identity, 57–74, 151 national secession, 194 nationalism, 59, 83 Chicano, 159 cultural, 117–20 French republican, 107 nationality, 57–74 American, 92–3 cultural groupings as, 169 Marxism and, 125 as political identity, 108 nationhood civic, 67–70 ethnic, 71–4 family model and, 156 in Ireland, 68 nations definition of, 64 place and, 60–3 primordialism about, 57

220

INDEX

and state, 57–60 native Americans, 161–2 nativism, 152 natural will, 116 negative liberty, 88 négritude, 19, 47 neighbourhoods, 158, 166n neutrality, 92 and law system, 176–7 Newby, H., 54n Nielson, K., 76n Nietzsche, Friedrich, 132–3 Nixon, R., 144n ‘non-neutrality’ thesis, 104 non-reactive groups, political recognition and, 27–8 Nowell Smith, G., 143n Nozick, Robert, 174–5 Nussbaum, Martha, 80 O’Connor, F., 74n O’Neill, J., 122n organicism, 85–6 orientalism, 133–4

political nations, and nationhood, 67 political philosophy, 1–3, 168 political recognition, ethnic groups and, 27–9 politics, of difference, 2, 177–8 Politics (Aristotle), 101–2 polyethnic rights, 179 Poole, Ross, 76n post-cold-war world, 210 postcolonialism, 135–9 postmodern identities, 139–42 postmodernism, Marxism and, 123–42 poststructuralism, 131–5, 139 Potter, D., 144n Powell, Enoch, 84 power, 30, 130, 132 primordialism, 23–6 ‘prioritisation’ thesis, 104 proceduralism, 174–7 property, 150–1 Protestants, 61, 192, 198 psychoanalysis, 140 public/private distinction, 89–90, 108–9 Quinton, Anthony, 83, 85–6, 99n

Pan-Africanism, 19 Parekh, Bhikhu, 53, 165n, 170–1, 176, 182, 185, 186n, 187n Parsons,Talcott, 54n partition, India and, 135–6 peoples, definition of, 2, 10 perennialism, 31n Phillips, Anne, 188n place, nation and, 60–3 planned economies, 181 The Playboy of the Western World (Synge), 64 pluralism, 177–82 definition of, 96–7 polis, 101–3, 104, 105 Polish independence, 125 political association, 150–4 political circumstances, national consciousness and, 59 political community, 105 political demands, 45 political identity, nationality as, 108 political liberalism, 93, 152–3 political nationalisms, 70

race, 9–17, 84 social construction of, 12–14 racial categorisation, 9–12, 133 as ideology, 12 differentiation and, 13 racism, 14–17, 109, 126 ethnic nationhood and, 71 Raphael, D. D., 164n rationalist cosmopolitanism, 80 Rawls, John, 91, 92, 93, 152–3, 186n Raz, Joseph, 96, 180–1, 187n, 199–200 reactive ethnic groups, 28 realism, 83 Reformation Liberalism, 86–90, 94, 151, 174 religious toleration, 152 Renan, Ernest, 69 Repressive State Apparatus, 130 republicanism, 105–9, 173, 212 common good, 160 tradition of citizenship, 158 residence, 157–60 Rex, J., 30n

221

INDEX

Ricoeur, Paul, 55n rights common sense of, 106 cultural, 167–70 indigenous, 161–4 Rochester, Earl of, 86 Roman people, 114 Roman republic, 123 Roman world, 79 romantic liberalism, 95–8 Roosevelt, Franklin, 161 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 107 Runciman,W. G., 54n Rushdie, Salman, 52 Russell, George (AE), 64, 73 Russification, 169, 170

Spinner, Jeff, 99n–100n Spivak, Gayatri, 136 stability, social, 92 Stalin, Joseph, 174, 186n Stanley, H. M., 15 states membership, 147–50 nation and, 57–60, 68 role of, 148 stereotypes, 9 Stoic philosophy, 79–80, 86 Subaltern Studies, 136 subjection, 132 Swift, A., 121n syncretism, 52 Synge, J. M., 64, 66, 67, 68, 70

Sabine, G. H., 99n Said, Edward, 133–4 St Augustine, 113–16 Sandel, Michael, 100n, 121n Sarup, M., 12 Scruton, Roger, 84 secession, 193–6 self-determination, right of, 189–93 self-government, linguistic groups and, 44 ‘self-written culture’, 51 separatism, 183 Serbian language, 40 ‘shared conception’ thesis, 102 ‘silence of the law’, 174 situationalism, 23, 25 skin colour, 11 Smiles, Samuel, 32, 47 Smith, Anthony, 31n, 70, 72, 144n social categorisation, racial description and, 10 social constructionism, 38 race and, 12–14 social relationships, changes in, 141 social unity, 92 solidarity, 181 Somers, M. R., 55n South America, racial categorisation in, 20 Soviet Union, break-up of, 168–71 Spanish language, 159 Spencer, Herbert, 36, 54n

Tacitus, 84, 99n Tamir,Yael, 34, 39, 96, 202 Taylor, Charles, 121n, 138, 177–8 territory, 61 Thom, Martin, 116 toleration, 88, 89 autonomy and, 175 religious, 152 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 72, 116 Totem and Taboo (Freud), 141 Translations (Friel), 62 tribe, allegiance to, 117 Trinidad, 41 truth, historical narration and, 49 Tully, James, 63, 162–3, 166n Ulster, 189, 192 Ulster Protestants, 61 Ulster Unionists, 193 United Nations Covenants on Human Rights, 189, 190 United States, 109, 147–64 American nationality, 92–3 American Revolution, 59 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 155 constitution of, 150–2 value assimilation, in Soviet system, 171 ‘value of membership’ thesis, 103 values, 45–8 van den Berghe, P., 31n, 165n

222

INDEX

Viroli, Maurizio, 116 Waldron, Jeremy, 122n, 214, 214n Wallerstein, Immanuel, 126 Walzer, Michael, 112, 121n, 150, 153–4, 158, 165n, 166n, 177 Washington, George, 162 Wearin’ o’ the Green (song), 57, 59, 60 Weber, E., 186n Weber, Max, 21, 58 ‘webs of significance’, 41–2 Welsh language, 42–3 Western imperialism, 16

western nationalisms, 67 ‘whole way of life’, culture as, 33 Williams, Eric, 41 Wilson,Woodrow, 197 Winthrop, John, 162 world citizenship, 149 Yeats,William Butler, 65, 68, 70 Young, Iris Marion, 118, 164, 166n, 183–5, 213 Yugoslavia, 40, 212 Zionism, 180

223

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