Review: [untitled]Author(s): Charles TaylorSource: The American Political Science Review, Vol. 90, No. 2 (Jun., 1996), p. 408Published by: American Political Science AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2082902 .Accessed: 13/06/2011 03:02

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Book Reviews: POLITICAL THEORY June 1996

Multicultural Citizenship. By Will Kymlicka. Oxford: Clar- endon Press, 1995. 280p. $29.95.

Charles Taylor, McGill University

This is a very important book, one that is indispensable for the present discussion of multiculturalism. There are two crucial facts about this discussion. First, it is cropping up in some variant in a host of different places-being more than an intellectual fad sweeping across international frontiers- because the problems of difference and how to live with it are forcing themselves onto the political agenda just about everywhere. Future historians will probably identify the sixties as the moment when things started to change, in this as in other domains. Formerly, a great many minorities accepted the conformity formula for democratic states. This was the idea that the public and political culture of the state-i.e., what it meant to be a citizen-was laid down once and for all by the hegemonic majority or the founding generation. The job of subsequent generations, cultural minorities, or more recent immigrants was to conform to this definition without trying to change it. In the last 30 years, however, the rules of citizenship are being progres- sively rewritten. Not just cultural minorities in the tradi- tional sense, but also groups who feel that the reigning formula does not reflect them, like women and gays, have demanded some adjustments. And even voluntary immi- grants no longer accept the formula as an unchallengeable given.

The most spectacular place to observe the contrast is perhaps France. With a political culture firmly in the grip of a Jacobin formula, France was extremely successful in integrating immigrants (e.g., from Poland) between the wars, so much so that one in four Frenchmen has at least one grandparent born abroad. Even earlier waves of immi- grants from North Africa were substantially integrated. But the more recent arrivals from the Maghreb have a different attitude, and the result is social trauma.

The second major fact about this wave of multicultural challenges is that the problems tend to be different in each society. They evoke enough common themes that one is tempted to think there is a single issue being played out in different places. People can be led to seek some general formula to solve the problem, but this is a terrible mistake. The situations are often similar enough that we can learn from each other. Yet there is not a single problem, but rather a family of them.

One of the great strengths of Will Kymlicka's book is that it attempts to articulate these differences. It is one of that too-rare kind, a book written by a philosopher who also sees the need to integrate a lot of politics and history in his discourse, and this is in fact the only way such a question can be tackled.

One crucial distinction made at the beginning runs through the discussion of the book. It demarcates multina- tional from polyethnic situations. In one context, a state is the home of more than one nation, by which is meant an historical community, "more or less institutionally com- plete, occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language or culture" (p. 11). In another, various immigrant groups have entered a society, without either the intention or the possibility of forming nations in the above sense, but they seek to avoid discrimination or to contribute to the evolving social formula.

This is an extremely important distinction-a fact that leaps out at you if you live in a country where both these contexts prominently exist together. This is, of course, the

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situation in Canada, constituted partly by Quebec and the aboriginal nations, on one hand, while being one of the world's foremost destinations for voluntary immigrants, on the other. The confusion between the two contexts- attempting to treat Quebecois as immigrants or fearing that immigrants might demand the same things as Quebe- cois-has greatly bedevilled the discussion in Canada, perhaps fatally. It is not altogether an accident that this book was written by a Canadian.

But important as this distinction is, Kymlicka recognizes that reality is much more complex. There are contexts, like those of African Americans, that fit neither of these slots. The classification is just a help, a way of avoiding the worst errors. It invites us to go on being careful about the fine nuances on the ground that that can make all the difference.

Kymlicka argues specifically from a liberal perspective, which makes the autonomy of all individuals a central value. He wants to show that the reluctance of many liberals to allow for any group-specific rights-their clinging to the principle that all rights must be "difference-blind"-is a terrible mistake. Not only can such thinking lead to some- times unworkable policies, but it can also involve denials of justice. In an interesting chapter (4, "Rethinking the Lib- eral Tradition"), Kymlicka shows that Liberals were not always blind to the problems of minorities and that the advocacy of benign neglect is relatively recent, arising in part from an overgeneralization from postwar American expe- rience, particularly the Civil Rights Movement.

The crucial argument concerning justice comes in chap- ter 5. Here Kymlicka takes up and reworks the basic thesis of his influential Liberalism, Community and Culture (Ox- ford, 1989). One of the things that makes autonomy such a crucial value is that it is a condition of our being able to think out what the good life for us consists in. But this thinking can only be effective to the extent that we possess a vocabulary for it. By this is meant not just the words but also a lively sense of what the different life-alternatives are which they name. This vocabulary we inherit from our culture. Cultures are not closed worlds and borrow a lot from each other. But successful borrowing requires a home culture in which new ideas are integrated, and without a functioning home culture people are incapacitated.

Now if liberalism involves treating people with equal respect, and in particular attempting to ensure equality in autonomy, then a case can be made for measures that help to protect and promote minority cultures that may be under great pressure in the larger society.

Kymlicka makes a crucial distinction here between inter- nal restrictions and external protections. Measures give cul- tural groups power over their members enabling them to enforce conformity are proscribed on liberal grounds. But measures that enhance the resistance of a minority culture against majority pressure may often be demanded by jus- tice.

There is, alas, no space to go into the interesting detailed discussions in the book of such matters as "collective rights" (chapter 3), the demands of justice in polyethnic contexts (chapter 6), the meaning and limits of toleration (chapter 8), the conditions of shared identity (chapter 9), and a host of other matters. But this is an immensely rich, informative, and above all clarifying work, written by a first-class philo- sophical mind, animated by a humane outlook. It ought to be compulsory reading for all those who want to carry on the debate in this area.