This paper considers normative questions about the integration of legally resident immigrants into contemporary liberal democratic states. First, I ask to what extent immigrants should enjoy the same rights as citizens and on what terms they should have access to citizenship itself. I defend two general principles: (1) differential treatment requires justi.cation; (2) the longer immigrants have lived in the receiving society, the stronger their claim to equal rights and eventually to full citizenship. Second, I explore additional forms of economic, (...) cultural, social, and political integration. I argue that the integration of immigrants depends upon a process of mutual, but asymmetrical adaptation and that it is precisely because the immigrants have to adapt more that the receiving society bears a greater responsibility to take steps to promote equality between the immigrants and the existing population. (shrink)

The relations between the majority and minorities in a democracy have been standardly viewed as the main subject matter of toleration: the majority should refrain from using its dominant position to interfere with some minorities’ practices or beliefs despite its dislike or disapproval of such practices or beliefs. Can the idea of toleration provide us with the necessary resources to understand and respond to the problems arising out of majority/minorities relations in a democracy? We reply in the negative and make (...) two main claims: first, that resorting to toleration is not enough to make sense of the problems deriving from the unequal participation of minorities in society, and, second, that it risks sanctioning the asymmetric relation between the majority and minorities informed by the negative judgement of the former towards some belief or practice of the latter. We suggest resorting instead to the idea of equal opacity respect for persons: all persons should be treated equally as moral agents, in accordance with their equally possessing the capacity for self-legislation, and as if they were opaque to our judgement for all those properties of theirs which exceed moral agency. Looking at the majority/minorities relations through such a lens enables us to understand (and appropriately respond to) what is problematic in such relations: the majority often fails to treat minorities as moral agents by failing to take their voices into account on an equal footing, by seeing them merely as recipients of certain provisions affecting them rather than their authors, and by considering them as legitimately exposed to the majority’s (negative) judgment. The purchase of our argument is illustrated by reference to two minorities whose treatment is paradigmatic of the problematic nature of majority/minorities relations across Europe: Muslims and Roma. (shrink)

Do minority groups have a right to the preservation of their language? I argue that the rights of groups are always reducible to the rights of individuals. In that case, the question whether minorities have a right to the preservation of their language is a question of whether individuals have a right to it. I argue that, in the only relevant sense of ‘right’, they do not. They may have an interest in the preservation of their language, but, if so, (...) that interest must be weighed against the costs of satisfying it, and, normally at least, we should expect that the costs will be quite out of proportion to the weight of the interests involved. (shrink)

Will Kymlicka's Multicultural Citizenship represents an extraordinary attempt to put applied political philosophy to work in the empirical context of contemporary political debates about immigration and ethnic minorities in western society. This paper explores the methodological and interpretative difficulties of combining normative and empirical goals, in a critical discussion of the examples Kymlicka makes of multicultural issues in France, Britain and the US. It goes on to argue that these weaknesses lie in the Rawlsian influence in Kymlicka's work, and that (...) political philosophers may have to rethink their methodological approach if they wish to pursue further the kind of applied work which Kymlicka is aiming for. (shrink)

The question of why group-differentiated rights might be a requirement of justice has been a central focus of identity politics in recent decades. I attempt to bring some clarity to this discussion by proposing a typology to track the various ways in which individuals can be harmed or benefited as a consequence of their membership in social groups. It is the well-being of individuals that group-differentiated rights should be understood as protecting, and so clarity on the relationship between group membership (...) and well-being is vital. One of the problems with the way in which such justifications have often been formulated in the past has been that they inadvertently position the group as a handicap to be overcome, rather than a value to be protected. I seek to overcome this limitation by clearly specifying the circumstances under which group membership is a liability, and the circumstances under which it has value. While this distinction is important, in both cases there is a relevant interest at stake, and thus the groundwork can be laid for a defence of group-differentiated rights. (shrink)

Justifications of group-differentiated rights commonly overlook a crucial practical consideration: if rights are to be allocated on the basis of group membership, how should we determine which individuals belong to which group? Assuming that social identities are fixed and transparent runs the risk of creating further injustices, whilst acknowledging that social groups are porous and heterogeneous runs the risk of rendering group-differentiated rights impracticable. In this paper, I develop a schema for determining group membership which avoids both horns of this (...) dilemma. (shrink)

This article starts by setting out the evaluative criteria provided by Will Kymlicka's liberal account of individual freedom and equality. Kymlicka's theory of cultural minority rights is then analysed using these criteria and found to be defective in two respects. First, his assignment of different rights to national and ethnic groups is shown to be inegalitarian with regard to generations after the first. Second, his recommendation of strong cultural protections is shown in some circumstances to undermine freedom and equality. Towards (...) the end of the article a policy of gradual and inclusive assimilation is described that may effectively promote the freedom and opportunities of members of cultural minorities. In conclusion, group-specific rights may, as Kymlicka says, be justified in liberal terms, but only where they differ in content from those he proposes. (shrink)

Since 1989 we have witnessed a proliferation of efforts to develop international norms of the rights of ethnocultural minorities, such as the UN's 1992 Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, the Council of Europe's 1995 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, and the Organization of American States' 1997 draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This activity at the level of international law is reflected in a comparable explosion (...) of interest in minority rights among normative political theorists. In this context, Michael Walzer's work occupies an important but somewhat anomalous role. On the one hand, he was arguably the first political theorist, at least in the postwar era, to take seriously the issue of minority rights. Nonetheless, Walzer's work has had surprisingly little enduring impact on multiculturalism debates in either academic political theory or international law. One explanation for this puzzle is that Walzer's substantive discussion of minority rights seems to sit uneasily with his more foundational theory of justice, laid out in Spheres of Justice . I want to suggest a distinct (but complementary) explanation for why Walzer's work has not permeated the debate, focusing less on metaethical worries about his account of common meanings, and more on the practicalities of how he categorizes ethnic diversity. Walzer's state-differentiated but minority-undifferentiated approach simply does not connect to the governing premises of the larger academic and public debate, which treat minorities as differentiated and states as undifferentiated. I believe it is Walzer's idiosyncratic approach to categorization—more than his controversial theory of justice-as-common-meanings—which explains his relatively marginal role in the multiculturalism debate. (shrink)

This paper address the challenges that have emerged in the attempt to codify and enforce international standards of minority rights. Without offering any magic solutions for overcoming all of these difficulties, my aim is to more clearly identify the challenges they raise and the pitfalls ahead of us if we ignore them. These include conceptual confusions, moral dilemmas, unintended consequences, legal inconsistencies and political manipulation. The paper concludes with some ideas about how international minority rights might be institutionalized more successfully.

The main purpose of this paper is to argue that there are no minority moral rights. Rights claimed to be minority moral rights, such as land rights and hunting rights of indigenous peoples, and the political and language rights of some minority cultures, turn out to be either collective moral rights which are not also minority moral rights, or else to be merely (possibly morally justified) legal minority rights which are not also minority moral rights.

Stephen May (2011) holds that language rights have been insufficiently recognized, or just rejected as problematic, in human rights theory and practice. Defending the “human rights approach to language rights”, he claims that language rights should be accorded the status of fundamental human rights, recognized as such by states and international organizations. This article argues that the notion of language rights is far from clear. According to May, one key reason for rejecting the claim that language rights should be considered (...) as human rights is the widespread belief that language rights are collective rights. In order to address this kind of objection, the collective character attributed to language rights must be carefully assessed, distinguishing two different views of what a collective right is. (shrink)

The provocative essays in this volume respond to Foucault's call to question what is regarded as natural, inevitable, ethical, and liberating, while they ...