The Legitimacy Clash by Alain-G Gagnon;

Author:Alain-G Gagnon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Multinational states, Federal government, Democracy, Majorities, Minorities
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Chapter Seven

Multinational Federalism: Challenges, Shortcomings, and Promises

Recent decades have shown the extent to which the pursuit of a common nationality, seen in many multinational states, can be harmful to many national groups and can challenge and even imperil the continuation of the all-encompassing nation state.1 Myanmar comes to mind, where the Bamar majority has sought to impose its will on other constitutive national groups (Bertrand 2012; Pelletier 2019). This case illustrates the extent to which majority nationalism can be an obstacle to achieving and sustaining a democratic, multinational federation. Meanwhile India – a country depicted in most textbooks as the most populous federal democracy in the world – has given serious signs of departing from the institutionalization of democratic federal practices (Adeney and Bhattacharyya 2018). The same goes for so many cases around the world, including Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Iraq, that have experienced problems in this respect.2

After a period particularly favourable to the advancement of deep diversity, from the late 1980s until 2005 or so, liberal Western democracies have seen a backlash against this trend. Politicians, state managers, and political associations in those years were encouraged to rally behind policies favourable to diversity, adopting vigorous initiatives so that diversity could enter the public discourse while being legitimized from above. It was this policy drive that produced UNESCO’s (2001) Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity in November, which states in its article 2 that “cultural pluralism gives policy expression to the reality of cultural diversity. Indissociable from a democratic framework, cultural pluralism is conducive to cultural exchange and to the flourishing of creative capacities that sustain public life.” This was followed in 2008, among many other policy initiatives, by the publication of a White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue entitled Living Together as Equals with Dignity (Council of Europe 2008), which stressed the combined core values of human rights, diversity, democratic citizenship, community engagement, and the rule of law, along with a strong policy posture in favour of intercultural dialogue. These two decades constituted the golden era for the advancement of public policies stressing cultural diversity as a rallying call at the international level. This favourable moment, however, was time limited.

Christian Joppke (2012, 1, 9) notes that states are now more inclined to take actions and adopt measures to secure or even fortify the majority culture and impose their authority at the expense of minorities. A kind of fatigue has settled in among majority groups in their response to claims made by minorities (Tremblay 2019). Joppke himself appears to be insensitive to the presence of distinctive political demoi as sources of legitimacy in the context of states composed of diverse political communities. For Joppke, “policies must protect the majority culture” (2012, 1). Such actions have in his telling become an imperative for states’ stability and even for their survival. Along the same lines, Brian Barry – exploring the impact of multiculturalism on state policies – is concerned that cultural diversity can lead to state fragmentation and “reward ethnocultural political entrepreneurs who can exploit its potential for their own ends” (Barry 2001, 21).

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