1 Kymlicka, Will, “Individual and Community Rights,” in Baker, Judith, ed., Group Rights (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Kymlicka, Will, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Kymlicka, Will, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Margalit, Avishai and Raz, Joseph, “National Self-Determination,” The Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990), 439–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Margalit, Avishai and Halbertal, Moshe, “Liberalism and the Right to Culture,” Social Research 61 (1994), 491–510Google Scholar; Van Dyke, Vernon, “Justice as Fairness: For Groups?” American Political Science Review 69 (1975), 607–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Seymour, Michel, “Anti-individualisme, droits collectifs et États multinationaux,” Le défi du pluralisme; Lekton 4 (1994) 41–80Google Scholar; and Réaume, Denise “Individuals, Groups, and Rights to Public Goods,” University of Toronto Law Journal 38 (1988), 1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 This is particularly important as an argument addressed to liberal democratic theorists, because it has not always been easy to show democratic theorists why they should see self-determination movements as advancing serious moral claims worthy of attention rather than just as movements to be undermined or boxed in by political strategies of containment. There are several reasons for the typical democratic suspicion of such movements. First of all, liberal democrats frequently look on nationalisms and other self-determination movements as destructive and retrogressive forces, based on a concentration on the needs and interests of one's local community over the broader duties and concerns owed to all other human beings. Nationalism in the nineteenth century frequently went hand in hand with movements for democratization and the extension of rights and the creation of democratic constitutions. But few modern nationalisms have this progressive thrust and their projects of aligning political boundaries with the boundaries of particular ethnic communities seem—in a world where there are many more peoples than can practicably have states—inherently destructive and destabilizing. This is especially true in a time when the constant circulation of peoples has led to the dense intermeshing of diverse ethnicities and religious groups in almost all countries. There are also questions of fairness. If the state reflects the values of one group in society and coerces individuals into actively supporting a way of life which is alien to them (for example, by taxing them and then giving this money disproportionately to the projects of other ethnic, religious or cultural groups), then it does a grave injustice. This raises serious questions about the fairness (and stability) of regimes devoted to robust cultural projects. (This sort of worry is best elaborated by John Rawls in his various writings advocating an anti-perfectionist state. See especially A Theory of Justice [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971], 325–29.) Finally, there are also problems of xenophobia and violence. Although defenders of self-determination point out that it is possible to imagine a political position in which concern for one's ethnic group goes along with a more general concern for fairness it is not always clear what relation this ideal position has with the actually existing nationalisms which we live with, most of which seem to encourage forms of xenophobia and, at least potentially, the possibility of violent struggle in order to guarantee the safety of the group. To the extent that culturalist arguments succeed then, they serve to overcome a very strong disinclination in democratic theory to take seriously the moral claims behind self-determination movements.

3 Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, 164–66.

4 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 83. The examples which Kymlicka gives of societal cultures are exclusively ethnic groups—Puerto Ricans, Aboriginal peoples, the Québécois and so on. He does not, as Margalit and Raz do, allow for the idea that various social classes and religious groups might also represent societal cultures (Margalit and Raz, “National Self-Determination”).

5 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 79.

6 Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, 138, 145–57.

7 See Beck, Ulrich, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans, by Ritter, Mark (London: Sage Publications, 1992)Google Scholar, and Giddens, Anthony, Modernity and Self-Identity in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

8 See Drucker, Peter F., “The Age of Social Transformation,” The Atlantic Monthly, November 1994, 54–55.Google Scholar

9 An excellent meditation on urbanization as assimilation is Glenn Gould's 1968 CBC radio documentary, “The Latecomers.”

10 As Logan and Molotch point out in their book, Urban Fortunes, neighbourhoods supply informal support networks which “provide life-sustaining products and services… neighbors and acquaintances who offer aid that can alter a way of life, such as referrals for an available job, a political connection to solve a problem, a welfare benefit, a lucrative criminal contact” ( Logan, John R. and Molotch, Harvey L., Urban Fortunes; The Political Economy of Place [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987], 104Google Scholar).

11 I am following Harvey, David in Social Justice and the City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).Google Scholar

12 Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes.

13 See Wilson, William Julius, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).Google Scholar

14 Ibid., 138.

15 It is, for example, very hard to imagine scenarios in which current-generation Québécois would ever lose access to the institutions through which they participate in their culture.

16 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 89 (quoting Margalit and Raz, “National Self-Determination”).

17 Ibid., 83–84.

18 Most, but not all. Some Aboriginal peoples who live in rural isolation may well exist as “encompassing groups” of the sort which Kymlicka talks about, and his argument would be proportionately stronger for such peoples. But the communities which could legitimately make the claim to be encompassing groups form a small subset of the groups whose claims Kymlicka's account is meant to justify. I deal with the unconvincing nature of holistic views of cultural belonging in much greater (and, I hope, more adequate) detail in Walker, Brian, “Rawls, Bakhtin and the Praxis of Toleration,” Political Theory 23 (1995), 101–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 88. Kymlicka notes this rupture but does not recognize how much it compromises his argument. Kymlicka suggests that the character of a community can change completely—Quebec can move from being a rural Catholic society with huge families to being an urbanized and secular society like most others without the importance of the Québécois community as a context of choice being in the least changed. But this sociological conception of culture as an assemblage of people in interaction marks a shift from the original, meaning-based, definition with which Kymlicka first justifies cultural protection. The value of cultures as contexts of choice was that they established a particular set of meanings which could orient people. The second view, of cultures as assemblages of people interacting with no reference to the distinctiveness of their institutions and narratives, does not support a claim against assimilation. If the question were merely how people could be guaranteed access to some sort of community, some set of narratives and not rendered rootless, then there should be no problem with assimilation. People do not lose cultural membership when they change cultures. They just move from being members of one culture to being members of another. When the Acadians of Louisiana lost their French and adopted English they gained access to a continent of other English speakers with whom they could deal without obstruction. They gave up their sense of predominant solidarity with one community for dual membership as Cajuns and as Americans. In becoming assimilated, people do not lose access to community and social narrative and cultural orientation. They just give up one set of these for another. If Kymlicka were to get an argument against assimilation off the ground, it would require a meaning-based account of culture, with practices and differences which could be endangered or dispersed—a particular repertoire which a group might want to protect.

20 See, for example, Inkeles, Alex and Smith, David H., Becoming Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as well as Inkeles, Alex, “Understanding and Misunderstanding Individual Modernity,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 8 (1977), 135–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 My point here is somewhat different from that made by Waldron (see Waldron, Jeremy, “Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative,” in Kymlicka, Will, ed., The Rights of Minority Cultures [New York: Oxford University Press, 1995], 93–119Google Scholar). Kymlicka answered Waldron's suggestion that many North Americans participate in highly cosmopolitan lifestyles (eating Chinese food, reading Grimms’ fairy tales to their children) by underlining that such cosmopolitanism is primarily a lifestyle of the anglophone society of North America, and that for most peoples movement between cultures is highly painful. My argument is different. I am suggesting that many of the backgrounds from which cultural minorities come have already been rendered cosmopolitan, in the sense that their everyday life is pursued through institutions which they share with many other national groups and many other cultures. That is to say, the institutional life they lead cannot be shown to have marked differences from that of the peoples who surround them. This is based on the assumption that if one is going to make claims about a group being culturally distinct one has to be able to flesh this out by showing that the actual institutions in which people participate are in some meaningful way differentiated from those of other groups. (This issue is somewhat complicated when we come to Kymlicka's theory because of a distinction he draws between cultural structure and cultural context. On this distinction see note 19.) My argument here is that this institutional differentiation cannot be shown for the case of modern Quebec. Quebec is already, in this sense, a cosmopolitan society. Among Québécois, everyday life and its assumptions and the values of the people are only minimally different from that of other peoples around.

Quebec is also, incidentally, cosmopolitan in Waldron's sense as well. Anybody who has ever lived in Montreal or Quebec City knows that Quebeckers are just as likely as members of the anglophone mainstream to go out for Chinese food or pizza or to read their children to sleep with foreign fairy tales.

22 The concept “encompassing group” is appropriate for certain groups which, due to some form of isolation, have managed either to remain separate or to create a separateness that locks them off from transnational and trans-statal institutions. Some Indian nations are like this, as are some religious groups such as the Amish. But to describe national differences as isomorphic with differences between societal cultures or encompassing groups is highly implausible and becomes merely polemical when used for groups such as francophone Quebeckers, for many of the Aboriginal people living in cities, and so on.

23 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 76.

24 The disjuncture between the cultural backgrounds that we draw on and the borders of the ethnic groups we come from has a number of important ramifications for Kymlicka's defence of the claims of national minorities. It raises the possibility, for example, that there might be no necessary connection whatsoever between protecting contexts of choice and promoting the self-determination claims of ethnic groups. Numerous empirical examples suggest that the connection between the stabilization of cultural contexts and the role of ethnic communities is considerably more complex than Kymlicka recognizes. For example, there are numerous diasporic peoples in the world, many of whom have thriving members who seem to suffer little disorientation from the fact that they must share power with the ethnic communities around them. Minority status, indeed, often serves to increase a sense of solidarity among community members. Conversely, studies such as Durkheim's Suicide ( Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans, by Spaulding, John and Simpson, George [New York: Free Press, 1957]Google Scholar) show that highly stable ethnic states can do a very bad job of providing a sense of meaning and orientation for their members, even in a country such as France, which for a long time stood as the classic model of a stable state which represented the will of a particular people. What if groups systematically misread the effects of these social and economic transformations and ascribed to their minority position developments which in fact affected minority and majority cultures alike? What if late modernity posed a generalized cultural threat which all collectivities had to deal with as they tried to reformulate their traditional lifeways in a context of constant radical change? The culturalist perspective is relatively insensitive to the possibility that general structural transformations—for example, in state and markets and in the activities of firms and bureaucracies—might be determining what is experienced in local communities only as racism and the accumulated results of outgroup xenophobia.

25 Kymlicka, Will, “Misunderstanding Nationalism,” Dissent 42 (1995), 130–37, at 131.Google Scholar

26 Levine, Marc V., “Language Policy, Education and Cultural Survival: Bill 101 and the Transformation of Anglophone Montreal, 1977–1985,” Quebec Studies 4 (1986), 3–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 The first three groups, at least, form “national minorities,” to use Kymlicka's term, and the specific culture of the island of Montreal has grown up out of their meeting.

28 Now it might be suggested, as did an anonymous reviewer for the Journal, that the sorts of issues that I am raising here might lead us to see the case of Quebec as being a borderline one to which Kymlicka's arguments are misapplied, with the suggestion that they might be more adequate elsewhere. There are two responses to this. One is that if space permitted one could easily extend the arguments I have set out above to show that Kymlicka's background conception of ethnic communities as “encompassing groups” and ethnicity as a dominant “context of choice” renders his arguments inappropriate for most of the cultural struggles in North America and perhaps for other parts of the world. The other response is that the case of Quebec simply cannot be seen as being peripheral within modern culturalism. It is the case to which writers continually return, and one of the two central examples on which Kymlicka bases his argument and upon which he invites us to judge the merits of his ideas.

29 I look at such cases in Walker, Brian, “Le libéralisme politique et le refus de l'assimilation,” Lekton: Le défi du pluralisme 4 (1994), 9–40.Google Scholar

30 Even here there is a large degree of choice as to how much a minority group will lose. Some states adopt an official language but permit visibility and social presence to other languages. Other states actively attempt to discourage public displays of all but the official language. Policies such as the latter are by no means required by the need to have a healthy public language, so even given the need to choose one or two official languages there is often space for the development of greater cultural fairness.

31 That Kymlicka sees some such process as warranted—at least for “mainstream” culture—is evidenced in his discussion of public holidays. Kymlicka recognizes that the official roster of holidays—Christmas, Easter, Good Friday and so on—unfairly reflect the needs of Christian members of society. He suggests that considerations of fairness might move us to “have one Christian holiday (say, Christmas), but replace Easter and Thanksgiving with a Muslim and a Jewish holiday” (Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 223, n. 9). This is liberalization as anti-hegemony, a move toward a vision of the state dedicated to cultural fairness, one which would aim at creating a state of affairs where there would be no victor and no vanquished in the struggle over public culture. The recognition that this project will never be entirely successful, that the state will always reflect a nonneutral cultural solution at the end of the day, does not compromise the utility of the fairness model as a regulative ideal.

32 Lewis, Oscar, “The Culture of Poverty,” in Ferman, Louis A., Kornbluh, Joyce L. and Haber, Alan, eds., Poverty in America: A Book of Readings (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 405–15, at 411.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., 409.

34 Harrington, Michael, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1962).Google Scholar

35 Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged, 138.

36 On the social imaginary, see Wright, Erik Olin, “Preface, the Real Utopias Project,” in Cohen, Joshua and Rogers, Joel, eds., Associations and Democracy (London: Verso, 1995).Google Scholar

37 I make this point in greater detail in Walker, Brian, “Social Movements as Nationalisms,” in Couture, Jocelyne, Nielsen, Kai and Seymour, Michel, eds., Nationalism, a supplementary volume of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy (1997).Google Scholar