Alan Patten’s theory of equal recognition and its contribution to the debate over multiculturalism

Abstract

In this introduction, we first give a brief overview of the debate over multiculturalism in political theory. We then situate Alan Patten’s Equal Recognition in that context by highlighting his major normative thesis, according to which there are reasons of principle, in a liberal democracy, to grant special forms of public recognition and accommodation to cultural minorities. Finally, we present a succinct summary of the nine articles that follow this introduction and that critically engage with Patten’s arguments.

Keywords:

• minority rights
• Alan Patten
• recognition
• equality
• multiculturalism
• liberalism

Introduction

Multiculturalism has been under attack from mainstream democrats, not to mention populist politicians, both in Europe and in North America.¹ In most cases, such politicians seem to have a very vague idea of what ‘multiculturalism’ is or should be. So the focus of their critique has been a fuzzy set of concrete circumstances and informal policies, including the number of immigrants that country X can or should ‘absorb’ or the pork-free menus in school cafeterias.

It is a pity that the works of political theorists – offering new theoretical concepts, subtle analytical distinctions but also concrete policy proposals – have hardly found their way into political debates. The works of Kymlicka (1989, 1995), Tamir (1993), Phillips (2007), and Parekh (2000), among others, have much to offer in this respect.

This said, it also seems fair to remark that the theory debate has lost its momentum. The fiercest critique of multiculturalism coming from a liberal egalitarian perspective of a distinguished political theorist (Barry, 2001), while certainly not ignored (see Kelly, 2002), has not really shaken the substance of the theory. Kymlicka himself has not been keen to revisit the philosophical foundations of his theory and has turned instead to exploring the ‘odysseys of multiculturalism’ (2007) in regional contexts, international organisations and welfare states. The debate over liberal foundations of cultural minority rights is today mostly carried on in side-alleys dealing with more specific questions, such as linguistic justice or religious toleration, while the agenda of a comprehensive theory of multicultural citizenship has lost ground.

Against this background, the publication of Alan Patten’s Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundation of Minority Rights (2014, henceforth ER) constitutes a notable step forward. It has been described as ‘the most important contribution to the philosophy of cultural diversity since Will Kymlicka’s Multicultural Citizenship’ (Philippe Van Parijs), ‘the definitive revision and restatement of some key multicultural arguments’ (Jacob Levy), ‘the best liberal case for recognition’ (Jeff Spinner-Halev) and ‘the most philosophically nuanced and sophisticated treatment of minority rights’ (Jonathan Quong).²

Such tributes written by prominent political theorists were a sufficient ground for organising a symposium³ on Patten’s book and for publishing nine critical reflections, as well as a reply by Alan Patten, in the present Special Issue of CRISPP. This collection of articles aims to provide an analysis of several critiques of Alan Patten’s theory of minority rights. In this introduction, we first situate Patten’s theory within the debate over multiculturalism. We then delineate a brief summary of the nine critiques.

The place of ER in the debate over multiculturalism

Will Kymlicka distinguishes three central stages in the debate over multiculturalism in political theory (2002). First, the Liberal–Communitarian discussion in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Second, a debate on minority rights within liberalism. That discussion started in the late 1980s when liberal theorists began to argue for minority rights from a liberal standpoint. For Kymlicka (1989, 1995), in particular, culture is a prerequisite of freedom and individual autonomy.

The third stage of the debate is about multiculturalism as an answer to nation-building. Here, the multiculturalist theorists argue that the actual practice of Western liberal states generally has not endorsed the principle of ‘benign neglect’ with regard to the promotion of identities, languages or cultures. With few exceptions (according to Kymlicka, 2002, p. 347, Switzerland is the only exception to this pattern) states have followed a nation-building approach and tried to construct some kind of common identity by promoting a single language.

Analytically, albeit not chronologically, we see Patten’s contribution mainly as a part of the second stage of the debate. Broadly speaking, Patten shares Kymlicka’s view that cultural minority rights do not require a communitarian justification and can and should be defended from within a liberal perspective centred on values such as individual autonomy and equal citizenship. He also arrives at broadly similar conclusions with regard to public policies and institutional arrangements addressing cultural diversity that deserve to be supported from a liberal perspective.

Patten and Kymlicka also share a liberal culturalist perspective – that is, the view that liberal policies of accommodation and recognition of cultural groups are justified by the value that cultural belonging has for individuals’ autonomy, well-being, or sense of self-respect. Indeed, Patten aims to provide better foundations for a liberal culturalist theory. He strives to restate the ethical foundations of liberal culturalism by ‘taking seriously’ the arguments of his opponents (ER, p. 5). There are principled reasons, Patten maintains, to say that minority cultures as such are owed specific forms of recognition and accommodation.

The two authors differ in other respects, though. Kymlicka, we believe, is committed to a comprehensive liberalism that promotes individual autonomy and he endorses a version of liberal nationalism that privileges the claims of national, autochthonous majorities and minorities over those of other cultural groups, most notably immigrants. By contrast, Patten’s liberalism is political rather than comprehensive and relies more consistently on Rawls’ (1993) idea that liberal justice requires state neutrality between reasonable conceptions of the good. Finally, while Kymlicka thinks that cultural neutrality is impossible for liberal states engaged in nation-building, Patten tries to pursue the goal of neutrality and argues that it can be approximated through equal treatment of cultural claims.

The central thesis that Patten wants to defend – called the strong cultural rights thesis – is that there are ‘basic reasons of principle for thinking that cultural minorities as such are owed specific forms of recognition and accommodation’ (ER, p. 10). ER proposes a novel defence of this thesis on liberal grounds. The kernel of the argument is a proposal for a new conception of liberal neutrality (Chapter 4). Liberal states have an obligation to be neutral in this sense and this justifies the strong cultural rights thesis (Chapter 5). These two central chapters of the book are preceded by the elaboration of a new, nonessentialist, conception of culture (Chapter 2) and a discussion on why cultures matters to individuals (Chapter 3). The final chapters of the book apply the main thesis to contemporary debates about language rights (Chapter 6), secession (Chapter 7), and the rights of immigrants as opposed to the rights of national minorities (Chapter 8).

ER raises a number of interesting, but also controversial points and many of them have been addressed in this Special Issue. In the following section, we present an overview of the main arguments raised by Patten’s nine critics.

Overview of the nine critical comments

Rainer Bauböck’s contribution ‘Unequal but fair’ approaches the same question asked by Patten – how and to what extent should a liberal state grant cultural rights to minorities – from a different theoretical and normative perspective. This perspective is grounded on equality of citizenship and self-government and stands in contrast with Patten’s ‘culturalist’ perspective grounded on a specific interpretation of the neutrality principle (‘neutrality of treatment’). Bauböck explores the arenas in which the two approaches are in tension. In case of conflict, he argues that ‘securing equality of citizenship and conditions for self-government are goals that justify some deviations from equal cultural recognition’.

In ‘Neutrality, autonomy, and power’, Eldar Sarajlić focuses on the role of autonomy in Patten’s theory. He argues that ER’s account of neutrality is based on a too narrow conception of personal autonomy – i.e. autonomy as self-determination – that weakens the overall plausibility and coherence of the approach. As such, it cannot account for various configurations of power that undermine both autonomy and neutrality. To address this problem, the author suggests a different conception of autonomy.

The theme of neutrality is then discussed more in detail, albeit from different viewpoints, by Chiara Cordelli, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen and Denise Réaume. In her paper ‘Neutrality of what?’, Cordelli argues that ER’s conception of neutrality – neutrality of treatment – does not live up to its promises as it suffers both from overreach and underreach problems which Patten associates with the two alternative conceptions of neutrality (‘neutrality of justification’ and ‘neutrality of effects’). In particular, she claims that by Patten’s own standards for a plausible conception of liberal neutrality, neutrality of treatment actually fails where neutrality of justification does not.

Neutrality of treatment is also critically assessed by Lippert-Rasmussen in ‘Dispositional neutrality and minority rights’. He agrees with Patten that the two dominant conceptions of neutrality (see above) have a number of deficiencies, especially with regard to the rights of minority cultures. However, neutrality of treatment also has shortcomings. The author therefore proposes a novel conception, called ‘neutrality of disposition’. According to this view, ‘the state must be disposed to treat citizens with different conceptions of the good alike in relevantly similar situations’. He then explains why, within a luck egalitarian framework, this conception could actually provide a better protection of vulnerable minority cultures.

Réaume’s contribution ‘Fairness and equal recognition’ brings a legal-theoretical perspective to the concept of neutrality. She compares and confronts Patten’s discussion of liberal neutrality with similar approaches in discrimination law and remarks that the recent literature on discrimination is largely ignored in ER. Her own approach allows us to see the different conceptions of neutrality in a new light. The main claim is that ER puts too many constraints ex ante. The approach grounded on discrimination assesses the facts ex post and could in the end provide more accommodation to minority cultures. To illustrate her point, Réaume considers the claims and the rights of speakers of minority languages, especially the French speakers in Canada (outside of Quebec).

The question of language rights is the main interest in Helder De Schutter’s ‘Two principles of equal language recognition’. Whereas ER endorses a pro-rated principle of distribution of resources to language groups, De Schutter argues for an equal-services principle. According to this account, the same absolute amount of resources should be given to all languages, irrespective of the percentage division of the speakers. The author thinks that his account is superior to Patten’s for three reasons: it is (a) more parsimonious, (b) more practical and (c) fairer.

The three final contributions focus on the role of democracy and on some empirical assumptions that are implicit or explicit in ER. In his paper ‘On the political and democratic preconditions of equal recognition’, Matteo Gianni maintains that Patten’s approach to recognition is too thin and static to be capable of addressing cultural conflicts in a democratic setting. He also thinks that ER neglects the importance of the political process in which struggles over recognition of minority cultures are resolved. In fact, not all cultural groups are in a position to advance demands for recognition and to make their voice heard. This is particularly true if we think of migrants without voting rights.

Patten observes that, while the democratic process should have the ultimate authority to make decisions about cultural rights, the question he wants to explore is what substantive principles and normative criteria should guide the decisions ‘of whoever it is that is legitimacy tasked with making decisions about cultural rights?’ (ER, p. 23). In ‘Normative political theory, democratic politics and minority rights’, Nenad Stojanović argues that an account of equal recognition cannot bracket out the ‘democratic element’. He contends that ER, being a contribution within the field of normative political theory, does not live up to its initial promise as it contains a number of reflections and recommendations that do include the democratic element. Also, there are many other arenas of political decision-making (e.g. the electoral system design, quotas) in which extending equal recognition to minority cultures means making decisions related to the design of democratic institutions.

A concrete illustration of this topic is given in the final paper by Albert Branchadell, entitled ‘Missing the overlap between theory and practice’. The author thinks that ER is based on a too narrow set of empirical assumptions. By citing empirical examples – most notably Catalonia – Branchadell claims that in debates on recognition of minority groups historical injustices play a much more important role than ER assumes. Also, equal recognition schemes can be significantly distorted by democratic majority rules, as well as the support (or the lack thereof) of other states and the presence of migrants.

Conclusion

Writing a comprehensive theory of cultural recognition after a quarter century of theoretical and political debates takes considerable intellectual skills and courage. Alan Patten’s ER is the result of such an effort, and it will become an indispensable reference point in the theories of multiculturalism.

At this point, of course, it is difficult to say if ER is the end of a long road or a signpost towards the future. But we find it hard to imagine a future theory of cultural recognition that could take a liberal culturalist defence of minority rights much further and surpass Patten’s in analytical depth and rigour.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by MIME (Mobility and Inclusion in a Multilingual Europe [grant number 613344], an FP7 project financed by the European Research Council).

Notes on contributors

Sergi Morales-Gálvez is a PhD research fellow in Political Philosophy at the KU Leuven, Belgium, and a researcher in the project on Mobility and Inclusion in a Multilingual Europe (FP7). He works on language policy, democratic theory, republicanism, nationalism and multiculturalism.

Nenad Stojanović is a senior research fellow and a lecturer at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. He worked on this Special Issue while he was a visiting research scholar at Princeton University. He currently works on a project on electoral discriminations funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Acknowledgements

We thankfully acknowledge Rainer Bauböck’s insights on the role played by Patten’s approach in the theories of multiculturalism. While he could not include them all in his article in this Special Issue, some of them have inspired our writing of this introduction.

Notes

1. See the statements by Angela Merkel that ‘the multicultural approach has failed, and failed absolutely’ (speech on Germany Day, 16 October 2010) and by David Cameron (speech at the Munich Security Conference, 5 February 2011). In North America, apart from the provoking declarations by Donald Trump, the mainstream Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush declared that ‘multiculturalism is bad for the United States’ (Associated Press, 22 September 2015). And Bernard Drainville, the Quebec Minister of Democratic Institutions and Active Citizenship from 2012 to 2014, defending the ‘Quebec Charter of Values’, criticised the Canadian model of multiculturalism (see his article ‘La charte des valeurs, un premier bilan’, Le Huffington Post, 14 April 2014).

2. The first three quotes stem from the book’s website at Princeton University Press (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10272.html). The last quote appeared in Quong’s review of ER in Les ateliers de l’éthique/The Ethics Forum (Vol. 10, Nr. 2, 2015).

3. The symposium took place on 4 June 2015 at the KU Leuven, Belgium. It was co-organised by the authors of the present introduction and Helder De Schutter.