Cultural Citizenship in Political Theory by Judith Vega & Pieter Boele van Hensbroek

Author:Judith Vega & Pieter Boele van Hensbroek [Vega, Judith & Hensbroek, Pieter Boele van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780415696487
Google: X2mWZwEACAAJ
Goodreads: 13716438
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

The first cultural turn: multiculturalism, Kymlicka-style

As was the case with Rawls’ theory, the rise of theories of (liberal) multiculturalism should be seen against the historical background of the development of western liberal democracies. While in the 1960s and 1970s this background was mainly formed by emancipatory struggles and demands for extension of democratic and participatory rights, in the 1980s ethnicity and cultural difference became important factors in political culture. The cultural background of many citizens differed from what mainstream liberal political theory assumed; a fact that came more readily into view once the historicizing view of political culture became more broadly accepted, as mentioned above.

Whether as a result of immigration, colonization, or other ethnic and cultural dynamics, many citizens nowadays are culturally speaking more or less ‘aliens’. They speak a different (first) language, have different religious and sexual mores, orient themselves toward a different culture, have close relatives in different cultures and political systems, and are willing and able to remain in close contact with this familial and political ‘otherness’ – in other words, citizens have increasingly become multicultural and transnational.

Mainstream liberal theory, such as Rawls’, had not stopped to consider what we might call the ‘provenance’ of citizens. It proceeded from the assumption of closed societies, with a fixed citizenry in a homogeneous, stable nation-state. But in the 1980s, scholars from within the Rawlsian paradigm began to direct their attention to the question of provenance, trying to adapt the Rawlsian framework and its notion of distributive justice theory to the conditions of multicultural citizenship. The best-known of these attempts is the work of Will Kymlicka (1995, 1989).

Kymlicka’s modifications of the Rawlsian framework basically entail the recognition that, to a certain extent and under certain conditions, culture should qualify as a ‘primary good’ (Kymlicka 1995, p. 84). That is to say, considerations of justice should take into account that members of minority groups, or at least certain members of certain minority groups, need ‘access to their own (minority) culture’ in order to be good citizens of western liberal democracies. Or in other words, good citizenship on their part may require recourse to their own culture.

Kymlicka’s multicultural liberalism therefore takes notice of the self-valuation of citizens, at least insofar as their – real or imagined – cultural descent is concerned, by guaranteeing them access to their own cultural (re)sources. This constitutes a valuable challenge to Rawls’ concept of the ‘social bases of self-respect’, a challenge taken up from the perspective of moral psychology and philosophical anthropology by theories of recognition, as most prominently developed by Axel Honneth, Charles Taylor, and Nancy Fraser (e.g. Fraser and Honneth 2003). Also, Kymlicka’s theory goes a considerable way towards acknowledging the claims of indigenous peoples, as being entitled to far-reaching exemptions from the regular demands of distributive justice, for instance by way of ‘multicultural jurisdictions’ (cf. Shachar 2001) and other rights- and policy-oriented schemes.

Typically, however, these qualifications of the dominant distributive justice paradigm are expressed by Kymlicka as handicaps, or burdens, of citizens with a non-liberal provenance.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.