Will Kymlicka and multicultural citizenship

In a debate on cultural plurality we can locate Kymlicka as one of the greatest exponents of liberal multiculturalism.^{Kymlicka (1996: 13-19} ; ^{2003: 29-42}; ^{2007: 61)}, as other multiculturalists such as ^{Parekh (2006: 179-185} ; ^{2008: 80-98)}, start from a common viewpoint: their opposition to the way liberalism approaches cultural diversity and the institutional design that goes hand in hand, this is to say, the construction of a unitary and homogeneous Nation-State.

In spite of this shared diagnosis, Kymlicka differs from multiculturalists in the way the problem of multicultural assertions has to be tackled, something that should not surprise us, after all our author is a liberal. ¹⁰ Let us briefly review Kymlicka’s formulations.

His thesis stresses the role of territorial borders in relation to the enjoyment of rights and justice administration, as well as the challenges this implies for postwar liberal democracies, which have undergone intensive and increasing diversification and cultural fragmentation (^{Pérez, 2007}). This phenomenon makes ^{Kymlicka (1996: 14)} propose the intention of “identifying some key concepts and principles to take into account and finally clarify the basic fundamentals of a liberal approach to the problem of the minorities’ rights”.

The Canadian philosopher states that liberal multiculturalism tries to distinguish the importance of cultural identity protecting national and ethnic minorities, but guaranteeing the validity of certain basic liberal principles (^{Kymlicka, 2003: 59}). Then, the State must adopt public policies that enable the members of diverse ethnic groups to express and promote their own identities, however rejecting those cultures that seek to impose themselves.

The starting point of this stance is to understand the relevance of social context as a requisite for the existence of an authentic and significant autonomous election. As supported by ^{Raz (2001:192)} “Only by means of socialization in a culture can we channel the options that give life meaning”. The connection of the statement with the communitarian thesis that defends the contextual nature of human beings is evident, with a preponderant nuance: such nature is only valuable as long as it contributes to secure a window of qualitatively significant options for each individual. ¹¹

Thus, cultures are no longer relegated to the private sphere, as stated by liberalism, but they play a central role in the shaping of decisive aspects in the construction of identity, as it is the case of language, education, or certain national emblems (^{Kymlicka, 1996: 152-164}) that translate as measures that “range from multicultural educational policies to linguistic rights, going through the guarantees of political representation and the constitutional protection of the treaties with indigenous peoples” (^{Kymlicka, 2003: 63}).

Modern States comprise —most of the times— various ethnic and/or national groups, which demands to overcome the liberal discourse of neutrality and accept that inside these groups there will be unavoidable cultural decisions that will affect those groups. Thus the need to recognize some rights of the groups appears, under the banner of a differenced and culturally oriented citizenship, to provide the minorities with the necessary mechanisms to face the discriminations they might experience from the majority culture.

For liberal multiculturalism, the dichotomy between collective rights and individual rights is false, as two sorts of restrictions or protections associated to them should be carefully distinguished: on the one side, there are external protections, i.e., those which authorize the —national or ethnic— group to be treated with the same consideration and respect as other equivalent groups; ¹² and on the other, there are internal restrictions, this is to say, those which deter the group from coerce their members, deterring themselves from revising their conception of good. ¹³

Collective rights understood as external protections are absolutely compatible with a liberal theory of rights that intends to foster autonomy, while internal restrictions are unacceptable (^{Kymlicka, 1996: 57-76}).

This way, by conceiving the minorities’ rights as a problem, ^{Kymlicka (2003: 59)} puts forward a proposal to face the challenge of multiculturalism in a liberal manner: minorities shall be protected by means of specific rights for the groups. This political proposal means to place, together with individual rights of liberalism and democracy, differenced rights in function of group belonging.

Therefore, ^{Kymlicka (1996: 13-19}; ^{2003: 29-42}; ^{2007: 61)} proposes to reform or broaden the liberal theory of individual rights, showing that this is compatible with the existence of rights for groups (^{Pérez, 2007}). The challenge of multiculturalism rest on how to prevent majority societies from imposing their institutions on those from a different culture.

^{Kymlicka (2003: 82-87)} is clear to criticize and pinpoint that the concept of multiculturalism is commonly used as an umbrella term to encompass a broad variety of non-ethnic social groups which, due various reasons, have been excluded or marginalized from the majority core of society —for example: the disabled, gays and lesbians, women, et cetera—. For ^{Kymlicka (1996: 36)} “a State is multicultural if its members belong to different nations (a multinational State) or if they have emigrated from different nations (a poly-ethnic State), as long as this supposes an important aspect of personal identity and political life”.

From the intersectionality approach, Kymlicka’s vision may be partial in the way of the meaning of multicultural challenge. In this respect, it is possible to mention at least three criticisms to this author’s postulates that might be broadened from such approach.

Firstly, Kymlicka’s theory does not allow giving an account of the minoritization of groups within societies —which “are presented as ahistorical, as though minorities had always been there and were not changing and part of a more complex and broader historic process” (^{Dávila Figueroa, 2013: 134})— where social relationships that are transversal and simultaneous at the same time concur.

With this, Kymlicka loses sight of the majority and dominant groups, excessively stressing the minorities, overlooking that these only “exist” in relation to a majority that is also internally diverse. This way, the concept of culture proposed by ^{Kymlicka (2003: 78)} is narrow for it does not consider the “constant creations, recreations, and negotiations of imaginary borders between ‘us’ and ‘the other(s)’” (^{Benhabib, 2006: 33}). “Us” always supposes some “another” which one differences from and from which one defines oneself; whereas that “other” must be understood from the crossing of a number of differentiation axes.

Secondly, and following the feminist critique to multiculturalism, the emphasis on minority cultures does not even take into consideration that inside these groups it is possible to identify other minorities that also require attention, as it is the case of women in the contexts of patriarchal cultures.

Susan ^{Moller-Okin’s (1999)} criticism has been key to unveil the tension between multiculturalism and feminism; it is based on the existence of a conflict between the claims from minority cultures of religions and the generic norm of equality accepted in all the liberal States, pointing out that multiculturalism is in itself bad for women.

In this direction, Kymlicka’s arguments (1990: 239-62 in ^{Moller-Okin, 1999}) in favor of multiculturalism do not take into account what he recognizes in other writings: the subordination of women is often informal and private, and virtually no majority or minority culture in the world would pass his proposed test of “no discrimination whatsoever” in the private sphere.

Albeit, Moller-Okin’s feminist criticism can only be assumed as a wink to an analysis that considers an intersectional approach, as from the latter the essentializing culture is avoided¹⁴ by demonstrating that the internal differences are a product of the simultaneity and crossing of various differentiation axes.

This way, although ^{Moller-Okin (1999)} points out the importance of considering women a minority group in patriarchal cultures, whose rights, in the framework of liberalism, are above cultural rights, there exists the risk to “rekindle the colonial dynamics of ‘otherness’” (^{Deckha, 2004: 22}). Intersectionality appears thus as a systematic analysis model that makes it easier to deconstruct and analyze the internal dynamics of groups of collective identities from a non-colonialist perspective.

Thirdly, Kymlicka’s vison focused on minorities’ rights does not account for domination and subordination relationships, which have to be seen from a standpoint that considers gender, class, “race”/ethnic group inequalities.

To the extent the author boasts that the granting of recognition and adjustment to the cultural difference implies the disappearance of structural-order problems, his stance —markedly liberal— loses sight of the importance of redistribution that, together with recognition, tries to accomplish social justice, beyond integration, assuming there are problems of political and economic order, in addition to the cultural.

^{Fraser (2000)} criticizes multiculturalism —and anti-essentialism¹⁵— for not being capable of relating a cultural policy of identity and difference with another social policy of justice and equality basing on a unilateral approach to identity and difference.

This tendency to deal with the difference as if it were exclusively cultural in nature shall be broadened by means of an approach that explains that issues related to it cannot be analyzed independently from material inequality, from differences in power between groups and from domination and subordination relations that occur inside the system.

It is possible to deepen into the limitation of ^{Kymlicka’s theory (1996}; ²⁰⁰³⁾ paying attention to ^{Parekh’s (2006: 99-109)} critique to his work¹⁶. The first reproach focuses on the rather narrow and essentialist conception with which he uses the term culture that directly impacts the clear distinction and the diverse moral weight that the demands of two types of cultural minorities would have: the national ones and the voluntary immigrants.

This differenced treatment is supported on the chances each minority has to provide their members with a societal culture. Since national minorities —being subsumed by a larger State— previously had a proper societal culture, they meet the minimum conditions to provide their members with the necessary frame to autonomously develop, and thereby, they have to be recognized the right to preserve or undertake their own national construction and enjoy some form of self-government.

“As a matter of fact, their societal culture provides them with a more satisfactory context than the one they would have had, had they been demanded to integrate into the mainstream society, since such is the culture those minorities identify and are more familiar with” (^{Kymlicka, 2003: 81} ).

Legal immigrants, ^{Parekh (2006: 99-109)} elaborates, are the other end. They are not national but ethnic minorities, they are neither territorially concentrated nor are fully institutionalized, their culture has been uprooted from its original context and cannot reproduce as such in other medium. Moreover, the fact of having emigrated in search for better expectations also supposes a genuine desire to integrate into the new society.

Because of these reasons, immigrants would not be enabled to exercise (and should stop demanding) the right to self-government and cultural autonomy, however they can demand to maintain some of their practices associated to their ethno-cultural identity, which will become faculties and exemptions that ^{Kymlicka (2003: 75 and 76)} calls accommodation rights.

In ^{Parekh’s (2006: 103)} opinion, the key point is that there is no weighty reason to make such distinction. On the contrary, such classification does nothing but to reflect a lengthy liberal historical tendency to outline on the one side, a sheer contrast between ethnic groups and nations, privileging the latter, and on the other, to establish a clear difference between immigrants and citizens.

On the basis of the same distinction made (between national and ethnic minorities), ^{Carens (2000)} and ^{Young (1997)} have criticized the rigid vision ^{Kymlicka unfolds (1996}; ²⁰⁰³⁾, as he only deals with antagonistic cases, omitting intermediate situations, as it would be the case of oppressed groups which, in spite of not belonging to those minorities Kymlicka focuses on, would indeed require the recognition of some accommodation rights (^{Carens, 2000: 52-87}; ^{Young, 1997}).

We find this would be the case, indubitably, of sexual minorities and women (Cf.^{Young, 1997: 48-53}; ^{2000: 89-93}). No less important, Kymlicka forgets —as we have stated— that minorities gather and behave in a complex manner in reality, obviating that inequalities derived from cultural differences must be understood as the result of the crossing of the effect of these with other important difference axes —such as gender, class, ethnicity, race and sexuality—, which makes their categorization difficult.

Let us think, for instance, of the Mapuche in Chile, who at the same time are a national, ethnic and/or social minority depending, among other relevant factors, on the geographic location they are; while gender and social class are interdependent elements in relation to how inequalities are experienced.

Charles Taylor and the Politics of Recognition

Another relevant stance in liberal multiculturalism is represented by Charles Taylor, who analyzes the recognition of identity of minority groups and these groups’ right to difference in multicultural contexts. Even if ^{Taylor (1993: 31-32)} is aware of the importance of the universality of rights and equality, for him it is preponderant to pay attention to the recognition of differences supporting this discourse:

[…] it has become familiar for us at two levels: first, in the intimate sphere, where we understand that formation of identity and I occurs in a sustained dialogue and in conflict with the rest of signifiers. And then, in the public sphere, where the politics of egalitarian recognition have performed an increasingly relevant role. […] With the politics of egalitarian dignity what is established intends to be universally the same, an identical “basket” of rights and immunities; with the politics of difference, what we ask to be recognized is the unique identity of that individual or group, the fact that it is different from the rest.

This way, following Taylor, what is interesting for the defenders of the politics of difference is to stress the recognition of the unique and original identity of each individual and community, which must be protected to avoid their homogenization by the identity of hegemonic communities.

In the public sphere, ^{Taylor (1993: 52)} states the problem that if a democratic society can conciliate equal treatment for all the individuals by means of the recognition of the specific differences that in such society manifest or if liberalism instead assumes a stance “blind to the difference”.

However, the author denies that this is necessarily so and acknowledges that in liberal thinking, and in some liberal societies, a different stance in noticed. From this, he states the existence of two liberal states: the one that intends to be neutral with the argument that individual rights cannot be restricted whatsoever, thus guaranteeing their equality for everyone; and the state that guarantees respect to the difference and does not pretend to be neutral.

The former represents the politics of dignity, which basically means that free and equal men have the same rights; therefore, the function of the State is to protect and secure those rights. In the latter, each individual and each group possess an identity and particularity that shall be respected, this way, the State is demanded to protect a set of practices, traditions and values that would make it possible for the individuals of the political community to identify with a determinate ideal of common good.

Taylor is closer to the second of these liberalisms. His arguments partly have to do with the affirmation of the principle of respect to minorities and with the fact that nowadays multiculturalism is a reality that spreads over the world and demands politics open to the recognition of cultural differences and collective goals.

A way to solve the conflict between the interpretations that supporters of the politics of difference and the supporters of universalism make of the modern discourse on recognition, conceived by Taylor, is that of a liberalism substantially committed to certain collective ends, i.e., a liberalism of communitarian vocation that does not seek to homogenize cultural identities. We will elaborate on this idea in detail.

Taylor’s communitarianism intends to demonstrate that things become relevant and our choices make sense only when contrasted with intelligibility frames the author calls “horizons of common meaning”. These are unavoidable, thereby:

[It follows that ] one of the things we can't do, if we are to define ourselves significantly, is suppress or deny the horizons against which things take on significance for us. This is the kind of self-defeating move frequently being carried out in our subjectivist civilization. In stressing the legitimacy of choice between certain options, we very often find ourselves depriving the options of their significance (^{Taylor, 1994: 72}).

For ^{Taylor (1983: 223-224)}, modern democracies face what he has called a “Hegelian dilemma”. This challenge can be summarized as: since there are no universal moral principles reason can discover or build, how to reach moral systems that do not uproot human being from the communities that are their identity focus in a modern society that seems to be inevitably accustomed to the principle of individual freedom?

Of course, in the opinion of communitarians, liberalism does not offer a good answer, because it is insensitive to the requirements that demand a more detailed consideration of the very community and traditions we are inserted into, in view of discovering which the communitarian values we share are.

The main reason why liberalism is incapable of facing this challenge is that it is a good example of the simplification that affects modern ethics which, inspired by the Kantian idea of the practical reason, fail to give an account of the depth and complexity of human morality. This translates into two structural mistakes of liberalism: in the first place, the urge to found a moral that does without a robust theory of good; and secondly, the search for principles with universalistic pretentions at the expense of excessive methodological abstraction.

For Taylor the only way to give liberal values an adequate interpretation —alternative to Rawlsian liberalism— goes through a detailed examination of modern society and its malaises. ^{Taylor (1994: 37-47)} identifies three forms of malaise that torment modernity and understands as such “those features of our contemporary culture and society people experiences as a loss or decline even as our civilization ‘develops’”.

The first of them is individualism: modern freedom was reached at the expense of escaping from the moral horizons we had in the past that, in spite of limiting subjects it also gave meaning to the world and the roles they perform in society. This way, individualism has a dark side that might be encompassed in the notion of loss of meaning.

The Canadian philosopher considers that the promotion of a permissive society and narcissism are clear symptoms of that negative aspect of individuality. But in addition to this first noxious feature, Taylor introduces other source of discomfort: the primacy of instrumental reason.

Just like individualism, this characteristic of modernity has been liberating; however, “the fear is that things that ought to be determined by other criteria will be decided in terms of efficiency or "cost-benefit" analysis, that the independent ends that ought to be guiding our lives will be eclipsed by the demand to maximize output” (^{Taylor, 1994: 41}).

Finally, the third somber feature of modernity is unleashed by the combination of the previous features and it might be identified as an expression of generalized disenchantment, which operates both at individual and social levels.

These dysfunctions deeply affect the political process and alter its form. Thereby, people can reach to exclusion

practicing a sort of politics that seems to be based on the belief that society is composed, in the best of cases, of citizens mutually uninterested and, maybe majorly, even malevolent in relation to the group in question […] Or else, the answer can be fostered by a philosophical conception of exclusion, let us say, a Marxists vision of a bourgeoisie society as irretrievably loss to the class struggle or certain feminist visions of liberal society as irretrievably vitiated by patriarchate so that an invocation from the political community is shown as a fraud and a hoax (^{Taylor, 1997: 364-365}).

Then, the way of making politics that naturally comes from theses exclusion forms —either supported on reality or philosophically projected, though by and large, a mixture of both— avoids committing to any liberal conception of general good.

According to ^{Taylor (1996: 17-123)}, the only way to give a new meaning to our culture and overcome such uneasiness that haunts it is to rearticulate the idea of modern identity, something we can only seriously do if we overcome the mere notion of what being a human agent is, a person or an I, to deepen into the comprehension of how the ideas on good, which such notion links to, have developed.

Thus understood, the endeavor that the Canadian philosopher undertakes is to a good extent a task that intends to recover the moral descriptions upon which our shared beliefs and moral institutions are supported. All in all, this task is not simple at all due to the narrowness of contemporary moral philosophy, which “has tended to focus on what is right instead on what is good to be, on defining the content of obligation rather that on the nature of good life; and it does not leave a conceptual margin for the notion of good” (^{Taylor, 1996: 17}).

We human beings are oriented toward determinate goods and ends, which emerge from the moral institutions and beliefs that provide the fundamental dimensions of moral thinking with content, which for their part are supported on a strong valuing that finds its explanation in a specific ontological conception of human being that starts from some referential framework. If all this is true, Taylor proposes that the study of ethics shall head toward a systematization of the idea of identity of the I and how it relates with a determinate notion of good. Obviously, this course of action implies denying moral subjectivism.

Well now, this systematization of the concept of modern identity necessarily goes through the recovery of the ideal of authenticity (^{Taylor, 1994: 61-65}; ^{1997: 294-299; 309-316}). Taylor points out that its sources are in the XVIII-century notion that people are gifted with moral sense; this is, we possess the capacity to understand good and evil not as matter of calculation, but as something rooted in our very nature.

Hence, authenticity demands two inherent features: it cannot bloom without strong bonds with the others, at the same time however, it excludes the validity of demands beyond human aspirations, which are counterproductive to the ideal as they destroy the indispensable for the realization of its authenticity. What Taylor means is that the definition of identity implies finding what is significant for each one and makes us different from the rest, however this singularity does not rest on the value of the mere choice we make on these distinctive aspects, but in the contrast with our unavoidable reference frameworks (^{Taylor, 1994: 72}).

Unless we suppose that some options have more value than others, the very idea of self-election falls into triviality, thereby into inconsistency. The ideal of self-election only makes sense because some issues are more significant than others; there cannot be a serious defense of our-self election because we prefer to choose steak with salad rather than stew for dinner.

And the significant is not something one establishes, for if it were so, nothing would have meaning; therefore, the very ideal of self-election as a moral notion would be impossible. Its success and misery is in the deeper nature of modernity; inevitably an increment in liberty can make people develop or degrade.

The question not only is whether the survival of identity in a crucible of diverse communities in multicultural contexts can be defended, but additionally if it is possible to demand that everyone recognizes in like manner the value of each of them. This question then should make us ask for the value that is received by or given to these communities, a value by virtue of which such communities might demand the recognition of their identities.

In order to adequately carry out such assessment of the value of a culture, ^{Taylor (1997: 199-220)} speaks of a “fusion of horizons”: we should allow our own horizons of meaning to broaden in function of those imbricated in the culture we approach. Hence, that which in principle was considered already established from our own cultural perspective will have to be compulsorily modified in order to try to understand the other’s viewpoint from their peculiar horizon of meaning.

From Taylor’s standpoint, the demand for recognition becomes pressing because of the supposed links between recognition and identity, where the latter designates something equivalent to the interpretation one person makes of who they are and their fundamental defining characteristics as a human being. ^{Taylor’s thesis (1993: 30)} is that our identity is shaped, partly, by recognition or lack of, which turns into a form of oppression.

By proposing a narrative model to conceptualize personal identity, the objective is to correct the abstraction of moral universalism anchoring it to the concrete context of community and develop the recognition of the specific differences of each people or group (^{Nájera-Pérez, 1999}).

Well now, the approach of intersectionality also allows reviewing Taylor’s postulates. Since the author considers the recognition of cultural differences constitutive of individual identity, from intersectionality, we can state that he ignores the multiple constructions of identity within various cultures and as such he does not coherently assume an interactive universalism capable of thinking of the other as concrete, this is to say, capable of recognizing the plurality of the ways of being human and distinguishing between them without disabling the political and moral validity of all those pluralities and differences (^{Benhabib, 1990}).

This way, if we assume that identity does not come only from a certain communitarian ascription, but intermingles with other sources of meaning and differentiation axes from which inequalities are (re)produced, it is pertinent to criticize Taylor for the somatic aspect of how identity is understood.

^{Benhabib (1990)} delivers some key elements in this direction, as he points out that the philosopher, in his conception of identity as a narrative, poorly pays attention to the recognition of a multiplicity of factors (gender, “race”/ethnic group, etc.) that determine experiences, and so, the narration of the I for oneself and for the rest.

This to say, as long as the foundation and unrest of subjectivities is dominated by the aforementioned categories, it is worth stating the validity of the demand for social recognition of the proper cultural identity of individuals, peoples and cultures exposed by Taylor, in the sociocultural complicities of definition and recognition of the other in terms of gender, ethnicity and cultural diversity (^{Nash, 2001: 35})

Likewise, Taylor’s maxim that all cultures are valuable can be placed in check from an intersectional standpoint, as this will depend on who values, i.e., from which multiple position they hold.