Democracy and National Pluralism

Ferran Requejo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134521258
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How can democracies deal with plurality? This book looks at the political accommodation of national plurality in liberal democracies and in the European Union at the turn of the century. Its panel of international authorities examines this issue from a variety of perspectives, considering questions of citizenship, multiculturalism, immigration and equality. The contributors, many of whom have set the terms of this debate in international political science, include Will Kymlicka, Carlos Closa, Michael Keating, Enric Fossas, Wayne Norman and Ricard Zapata Barrero.

1 Introduction

‘It is so very Late that we May Call it Early by and by’

Ferran Requejo

In a nocturnal scene, on seeing dawn’s light entering the room where he is standing, one of the characters in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet exclaims: ‘It is so very late that we may call it early by and by.’¹ Something similar could be said of the current situation of liberal democracies. Their theoretical health and undeniable practical success over the past two centuries do not hide, however, some of the conceptual and institutional shortcomings they display when faced with the ‘new dawn’ that some aspects of politics are experiencing at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Democratic liberalism has established itself as the most desirable, from a theoretical perspective, and the most stable, from a practical perspective, of all contemporary political traditions. It has a diverse and plural history that has been written by thinkers of acknowledged intellectual prestige such as Locke, Madison, Jefferson, Kant, Toque-ville, Mill, Weber, Berlin and Rawls. Its values and legitimising principles have shown themselves to be more suitable for practical application than those of alternative political theories. Furthermore, democratic liberalism is a practical and constitutional tradition that has no rivals among present-day political systems. It has been so successful that issues such as the protection of rights and freedoms, the existence of competitive elections and of an effective form of political pluralism, the implementation of the principles of constitutionality and legality, the separation and the division of powers or the articulation of a market economy with a degree of public interventionism have become generally accepted ‘meta-values’ in Western societies.

However, this intellectual and constitutional solidity and the absence of rival political systems does not mean that liberal democracies can consider themselves entirely ‘just’ systems that have no drawbacks or features that work against emancipation; or that they are somewhere at ‘the end of history’. Nor does it mean that it is easy to find new normative and institutional solutions from its legitimising and organisational principles when it comes up against new political challenges. This is true, for example, when it is forced to deal with such phenomena as globalisation, cultural pluralism or new kinds of international relations. When faced with these phenomena, the language, the institutions and even the usual interpretation of fundamental liberal and democratic values – liberty, equality, pluralism or dignity – require a revision of the theory and, above all, a series of practical and constitutional reforms that will bring about a moral improvement and a better adaptation to the new economic, political, cultural and technological conditions that prevail at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

One of the two main elements of this book is a revision of the theory of democratic liberalism from the perspective of one of the main phenomena of cultural pluralism: the national pluralism that exists in some democracies – plurinational democracies. This work contributes to the debate that has emerged during the 1990s concerning the rights of cultural minorities and liberal democracy. This is a debate that explodes the myth that empirical democracies are neutral in relation to cultural pluralism. Nowadays it is difficult to argue that the recognition of the cultural rights of minorities within a democracy is inherently discriminatory or arbitrary. There are fewer and fewer liberal theorists who still maintain that liberal-democratic institutions are neutral when dealing with cultural issues, and there are also fewer who oppose the regulation of certain cultural rights, including the rights of national minorities. This discussion has also helped to reveal the intellectual difficulties that traditional democratic liberalism displays when it has to deal with the cultural pluralism of contemporary societies. These difficulties are related, at least partly, with two theoretical attitudes of traditional liberalism. First, there is the tendency to use a number of extremely abstract legitimising categories – individual rights, citizenship, equality, and so on – which often leads to a homogeneous interpretation of these categories, which in turn makes it more difficult to deal with their internal pluralities. Second, the selection of a number of ‘research questions’ that usually causes traditional democratic liberalism to take for granted and refuse to revise the linguistic, historical and political culture of majority ‘national’ groups. Cultural identities constitute, along with interests and values, a third element of democratic legitimacy, as well as an element of individual dignity. This is an aspect that has been largely marginalised by traditional liberal-democratic theories.

We are becoming increasingly aware of the hegemonic cultural particularisms that hide behind the ostensibly neutral and universal concepts and discourse of liberal-democratic theories. We are becoming increasingly aware of the power relations that operate in the cultural sphere, in addition to those related to social class and gender, to cite but two. It would appear that classical liberal agnosticism practised with regard to religion cannot be extrapolated to issues such as linguistic policies, school curricula or the ‘national’ self-perception of democratic collectives. This is and will increasingly be related to the regulation of citizenship in democracies which, as we enter a new century, shows all the signs of being characterised by increasing internal cultural pluralism and by a growing process of globalisation.

The other main theme in this volume is the recognition and practical accommodation of national pluralism in democratic polities. Of all the challenges faced by present-day democracies, those related to national pluralism have been, and continue to be, problematical from both a conceptual and an institutional standpoint. This is the case when the legitimacy of any given state is called into question or when, in more moderate terms, distinct national collectives express a wish to be recognised as such constitutionally and to enjoy their own form of national self-government within the democratic polity. This is the case of existing democracies such as Belgium, Canada, Spain, the United Kingdom or, on a different level, of the possible future development of the European Union.

In fact, in the West, to speak today of nationalisms (majority or minority) is to speak of democracy. In other words, it is to speak of individual and collective rights; of institutions and of decision making processes in different geographical areas – regions, states and supra-states; of the accommodation of different national symbols; of federalism and the division of powers; or of the legitimacy or not of incorporating processes of secession into the liberal-democratic rules of the game. With the present form of political liberalism, minority democratic nations such as Quebec, Scotland, Flanders or Catalonia, and their relationship with the plurinational democracies to which they belong – Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium and Spain – cannot be adequately addressed using the premises and categories of nineteenth-century nationalisms. These nationalisms, in their state or stateless forms, tended to maintain an ambiguous relationship with liberal-democratic principles. This is in sharp contrast to the eminently liberal-democratic nature of majority and minority nationalisms of the political entities mentioned above. The concept of a uniform national democracy, based on the republican idea of a homogeneous and sovereign political unit is no longer adequate in plurinational contexts. This calls for differences in the descriptive and normative analyses of institutions and decision-making processes such as the rights of citizenship, parliamentarianism, federalism, foreign representation, and so on, depending on whether we are in uni-national or plurinational democracies.

The conclusion is that there has been no in-depth questioning of, on the one hand, what is meant by the implementation of the ‘universal’ values of democratic liberalism in states which are always particular and, on the other hand, the fact that there has been a marginalisation of the relationship between the processes of nation-building carried out or demanded by the different types of nationalism and liberal-democratic normativity. One thing that both aspects have in common is that it is assumed that there can be only one demos per democracy, in order perhaps to ignore the possibility of establishing a relationship between majority and minority national particularisms on an equal footing, or perhaps in order to justify secession processes that appear to lead to the establishment of as many democracies as there are national demoi. It is surprising, for example, how the main political theories of democratic liberalism, including most of the soundest and most refined ones from an intellectual perspective, such as those of Rawls and Habermas, display deficiencies when they have to deal with national pluralism. This is a question that is not so much badly resolved as completely unaddressed by the premises, concepts and normative questions of these theories. And this is despite the fact that, practically speaking, all liberal democracies have acted as nationalising agencies for specific cultural particularisms. So, it is the aim of this volume to identify the need to substitute this ‘monist’ conception of the democratic demos with one that is more ‘pluralist’ when dealing with plurinational democracies.

The link between the two main elements in this book – the revision of democratic liberalism and the practical political accommodation of plurinational polities – suggests that the challenges posed in the spheres of rights, symbols, institutions, competences or foreign affairs demands a revision of the interpretations of the liberal-democratic normativity itself. This revision should not be viewed as an external confrontation between ‘democratic liberalism’, on the one hand, and ‘nationalism’, on the other, but as a way of achieving an internal accommodation, in liberal-democratic terms, between distinct national collectives within the same polity. It also suggests that the practical constitutional implementation of this accommodation cannot be guaranteed only by the traditional regulation of civil, political and social rights of citizenship, which frequently results in a series of cultural biases that favour majority national groups.

The key question raised in the contributions to this volume is that of the normative and institutional quality of plurinational democracies in a globalised political, economic, technological and cultural context. In plurinational democracies, the quality of a democracy should go beyond the mere ‘justice’ of its institutions. It should include a sense of accommodation and solidarity between the different groups of which it is composed. We are clearly dealing with democracies with complex national identities, which pose questions of legitimacy that are different to those posed by uni-national democracies. In this context, what is at stake is a ‘better’ interpretation and a ‘better’ institutionalisation of the liberal-democratic values of liberty, equality, pluralism and dignity. This can be achieved by means of a political and constitutional recognition of democratic plurinationality and a form of self-government for the majority and the minority nations that is consistent with such a recognition. In other words, ways need to be found to improve those values that inhabit the spheres of rights, institutions and collective decision-making processes. We need a revision and a series of reforms that will minimise the risk that, to quote Shakespeare once more: ‘Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.’²

Contributions to this Volume

In Chapter 2 entitled ‘The new debate over minority rights’, Will Kymlicka analyses how discussion on minority rights in the sphere of Western political theory has evolved in the 1980s and 1990s. Four phases are identified. First, this discussion was established from a communitarian perspective. This is an approach which links up with classical debates of political thought on the priority of individual liberty. In this phase, the defence of minority rights meant accepting, to a large extent, the communitarian criticism of political liberalism. In contrast, the debate in the second phase is between liberals. Kymlicka points out that the debate in the earlier phase was deficient in its basic approach for two reasons: it misinterpreted the nature of cultural minorities and that of democratic liberalism itself. Although some empirical exceptions can be found, most minorities (immigrants, national stateless minorities, and others) do not wish to protect themselves from modernity, but to be recognised and participate in it on an equal footing. In the debate on minority rights, it is now proposed that cultural demands linked to identity require a revision of liberal principles, such as the notions of liberty and equality, that have arisen in basically homogeneous societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is where the author’s well-known distinction between ‘external protections’ and ‘internal restrictions’ should be situated. The third phase approaches minority rights from a different perspective: as a response to the processes of state nation-building. The key point is a criticism of the alleged cultural neutrality of the principles that regulate the public sphere in democracies. Religion, Kymlicka tells us, may be treated neutrally by the liberal state; culture may not. As far as the latter is concerned, neutrality is false both conceptually and historically. In all democracies a series of nation-building processes are carried out. They are sometimes guided by a series of completely legitimate objectives (education, economic efficiency, welfare services) that involve implicit integration in a ‘societal culture’. Here the debate is about the liberal or non-liberal nature of the process of nation-building. This question lays down two basic challenges: the need to construct an acceptable theory of nation-building, for both national majorities and minorities, from liberal premises, and the regulation of more just forms of political integration for immigrant minorities from the point of view of cultural identity. Finally, the author speculates about the beginning of a fourth phase based on the fact that critics of minority rights do not question their inherent ‘justice’, but the erosionary effects that they have on ‘civic virtues’ and practices linked with democratic ‘citizenship’. Minority rights are not questioned because they are unjust, but because they destabilise, although, as the author points out, the critics fail to offer any empirical evidence that this is the case as far as democracies are concerned.

The current processes of nation-building of stateless nations is the issue addressed in Michael Keating’s Chapter 3, ‘Nations without states: minority nationalism in the global era’. The basic context of these processes is ruled by three transformations of the state: the construction of supra-state frameworks like the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); the processes of deregulation and privatisation of the public sectors; and the emergence of sub-states as distinct political players. Despite the fact that the states retain a large part of their functional character, these three transformations signify an increasing interdependence between states, as well as an erosion of their legitimacy. In this context, the stateless nations must re-address their own processes of nation-building. Keating poses, first of all, the question of collective identity itself. The modernisation of the nationalisms is based on their ability to connect the past and the future, and through identities of a cultural rather than of an ethnical nature. Thus, linguistic policies, which are usually a central element in the process of nation-building are not established in order to achieve a single cultural code – as did, in most cases, the state nation-building movements of the nineteenth century – but in order to consolidate national identity while more plural situations, with bilingual and multiple-identity practices are established. Catalonia and Scotland display a higher level of coexistence, while Wales and the Basque Country are more divided societies. Quebec is somewhere in between these two. Second, constitutional options in order to exercise the right of self-determination (independence, sovereignty, confederation, plurinational federalism) show indecision that reflects uncertainty about the significance of independence and self-government in the world today. People’s answers on the subject of independence depend on how the question is formulated. Third, the EU represents both an opportunity for the functional autonomy of European stateless nations, albeit through their respective states, and a new area for symbolic projection. Finally, the author points out the importance of territorial systems of production, and of processes of institution-building – by means of asymmetrical regulations – for the consolidation of stateless nations as more than just regions. Techniques of decentralisation are not enough for a political accommodation that recognises the multiple national identities that exist in some states, although the existence of frameworks like the EU offers greater chances to establish processes that combine elements of cooperation and competence.

Enric Fossas’ Chapter 4, ‘National plurality and equality’, analyses one of the possible constitutional solutions mentioned in Chapter 3: plurinational federalism. The analysis hinges on the relationship between federalism and equality, a question which is always present in any political and academic debate about federalism, above all in plurinational states. After establishing a series of analytical distinctions, Fossas discusses political equality through its three classical senses in plurinational federations: equality among the founding groups of the federation; equality among federated units; and equality among the citizens of the federation. First, the evolution of plurinational societies and federalism reveals the limits of the latter as a framework for political accommodation in these societies. There are a number of processes linked to the development of modern states that have worked against equality among the founding groups of the federation. Among them are democratisation (civil equality), state interventionism, and the processes of nation-building. Second, the discussion about equality among the federated units often presents, in the case of plurinational federations, a clash between two incompatible conceptions of federalism. On the one hand, that which defends federal agreements as a way of expressing the different identities and the self-government of the national groups that coexist within the federation. In this case, one defends the suitability of establishing asymmetrical mechanisms when the society in question displays asymmetries in the national identities of its people. On the other hand, the conception that understands federalism as a technique for decentralising power, and whose aim is linked to the development of democracy or of the general efficiency of the political system. This clash is present in the debate on federalism in Belgium, Canada or Spain. Depending on the perspective adopted, the perception of the inequalities will be diametrically opposed. At the heart of the matter, there is a tension between understanding the political collectivity as a single, albeit culturally plural, reality, or understanding that what exists is a plurality of political collectivities (or of demoi). The contrast between these two visions reflects a process of competitive nation-building in which state nationalism has traditionally been very belligerent. Finally, Fossas deals with equality of citizenship, a concept that also has a tense relationship with the concept of federalism. The process of universalisation of rights has tended towards a standardisation between the citizens of the federations, albeit to a lesser degree than in non-federal states and not necessarily related to greater centralisation. From the perspective of national minorities, the criticism made is that behind universalism as a legitimising argument for democracies are the cultural values of the majorities. The argument of equality of citizenship, concludes Fossas, against the establishment of federal asymmetries is not acceptable. Following what Jeremy Weber pointed out ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction ‘It is so very Late that we May Call it Early by and by'
• Part I Minority Rights and Globalisation in Multinational Democracies
• 2 The New Debate over Minority Rights
• 3 Nations Without States Minority Nationalism in the Global Era
• Part II National Pluralism and Democratic Institutions
• 4 National Plurality and Equality
• 5 Secession and (Constitutional) Democracy
• Part III National Pluralism and the European Union
• 6 National Plurality Within Single Statehood in the European Union
• 7 The Limits of a Multinational Europe Democracy and Immigration in the European Union
• Part IV Pluralism, Democracy and Political Theory
• 8 Democratic Legitimacy and National Pluralism
• Index