Liberal democracy, nationalism and culture: multiculturalism and Scottish independence

Abstract

Proponents of Scottish independence often foreground the claim that Scotland forms a democratically relevant and underrepresented community that would function better as an independent state. This argument casts the nation in cultural rather than ethnic or purely political terms, and thus implicitly draws on forms of both liberal nationalist and multicultural political theory. We argue that any plausible articulation of such a ‘cultural nationalism’ ultimately reduces to a series of interrelated claims about the nature and effects of culture, identity and meaning. We provide a post-foundational account of culture and identity as fluid, contested, and overlapping, which we argue renders the cultural nationalist position unsustainable. We argue Britain is really constituted by multiple tiers of political identities, communities, and democratic structures, which suggests traction for post-nationalisms such as political liberalism and cosmopolitanism. We then sketch a distinctive form of post-national cosmopolitanism that focuses on local rather than universal attachments, identities and practices. We conclude that more polycentric governance is required to help accommodate the fluid nature of culture and identity. A deeper analysis of multicultural political theory post-Brexit therefore supports a fundamental remaking of current constitutional arrangements and radical devolution across the whole of the United Kingdom.

Keywords:

• Multiculturalism
• liberal nationalism
• identity
• democracy
• post-foundationalism
• devolved governance

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Erratum

Acknowledgements

Mr Ashcroft would like to thank Andrew Fagan, Kristi Govella, Nina Hagel, Athmeya Jayaram, and the journal’s anonymous referees, for their helpful written comments on an earlier draft of this article. He would also like to thank Judith Sijstermans for her invaluable advice regarding Scottish politics and nationalism, and Thomas Jones for editorial advice. His work on this article was supported by the Center for British Studies at UC Berkeley and the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. The article was greatly improved as a result of being presented to the other contributors to this volume during a workshop on Multiculturalism in Contemporary Britain at the University of California, Berkeley.

Notes

1. This argument was placed at the core of the Yes campaign by its de facto leader Alex Salmond in his speech of 12 July 2013 (Salmond, 2013).

2. The Scottish Government White Paper Scotland’s Future (2013, p. 271), arguing for independence, insisted that ‘a commitment to multicultural Scotland will be a cornerstone of the nation on independence’.

3. The critique of cultural nationalism here builds on claims regarding culture and meaning in Bevir (1999), which also provides a defence of post-foundationalism, as does Ashcroft (in press). The cosmopolitanism developed here builds on the account set out in Bevir (2000a, 2000b) and Ashcroft (in press). An alternative cosmopolitanism which nevertheless flows out of a similar critique of cultural nationalism has been developed by Arash Abizadeh. For another important discussion of related issues see Benhabib and Post (2006).

4. This claim is perhaps more controversial in respect to Kymlicka than to Miller, but as we explain below, Kymlicka’s focus on ‘societal cultures’ as the crucial site of individual choice leads him to prioritize the claims of minority national groups over other cultural minorities.

5. Societal culture is defined in terms akin to a fully functioning and self-contained society which shares a common culture across public and private spheres. In his early work, Kymlicka is explicit and consistent in his close association between societal cultures and national culture: ‘just as societal cultures are almost invariably national cultures, so nations are almost invariably societal cultures’ (Kymlicka, 1995, p. 80, see also pp. 75–76, 93ff, 105ff, 125). In his later work Kymlicka utilizes a thinner conception of societal culture closer to a civic/political nationalism (see Chambers, 2003, for a helpful discussion). We believe the thicker and earlier account of culture is a necessary part of Kymlicka’s distinctive defence of multicultural rights for national minorities and focus on it here.

6. This central ‘equality’ argument is therefore built in two stages, with the first stage concentrating on autonomy and the second on self-respect, although the two run into each other to some degree. First, Kymlicka argues that ‘individuals … need access to a societal culture’ in order to effectively choose how to live (our emphasis). Second, he argues that ‘access to one’s culture’ is something to which individuals are ‘reasonably entitled’ due to their ‘deep bond’ to it, which stems from both its role in providing meaningful options and its link to self-respect/identity (our emphasis). It is the first claim, regarding the constitutive role of culture in autonomous choice, that we shall concentrate on in this paper, although our discussion will have ramifications that cannot be explored in detail here for the second claim regarding the link between identity, self-respect and the status of our culture.

7. The two main groups Kymlicka looks at are ‘national minorities’, such as indigenous people or the Catalans, and ‘immigrants’, by which he primarily means ethnic and religious minorities who voluntarily migrate. He defines a nation – and therefore a national minority – as

a historical community, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language or culture … [a] ‘nation’ in this sociological sense is closely related to the idea of a ‘people’ or a ‘culture’ – indeed, these concepts are also defined in terms of each other.

Kymlicka thus thinks of nations in cultural rather than ethnic or racial terms, and advocates self-government rights for many national groups (see Kymlicka, 1995). In contrast he argues that immigrant groups in their new country do not receive self-government rights, in part because they do not occupy a specific homeland or have their own comprehensive institutions, expressing their culture primarily in their family lives and voluntary associations rather than recreating their societal culture in toto.

8. Kymlicka seems to prefer something like the ‘devo-max’ option for Scotland within the context of a formal federal structure for the constituent nations of the UK, Scotland included (see the exchange between Kymlicka, 2011, and Miller, 2011). Yet there seems no reason to resist Scottish independence under the terms of his theory if it is desired by the populace and practicable (Kymlicka, 1995, p. 186).

9. In any event, it is difficult to separate the political ‘nation’ from the cultural nation cleanly even at the level of theory, not least because it would by definition need a shared political culture. It is more plausibly a project to be realized – perhaps via institutional reform – rather than an entity which pre-exists and justifies particular institutional arrangements. In fact, a political ‘nation-in-waiting’ would seem to be indistinguishable from a cultural nation. Regardless as to whether a pure political nationalism or similar political liberalism is viable, or whether a more capacious sense of ‘belonging to a polity’ (see the article by Mason in this volume) can do the relevant work instead, the standard liberal nationalist claim clearly refers to the broader elements included in a ‘cultural nation’.

10. This cultural nationalism is distinctively liberal in that, like a political conception of the nation, but unlike ethnic nationalism, in principle anyone can become a member. Any cultural nationalism that is exclusionary will be so because it is blended with an ethnic nationalism of some variety, and therefore does not fall under our use of the term. Our definition of the term is uncontroversial, and broadly matches Kymlicka’s own vocabulary (see Kymlicka, 2001, Chapters 2 and 12).

11. This claim can be attributed to both Kymlicka and Miller and is sometimes parsed as simply ‘shared values’, but for this to be empirically plausible in diverse societies it must be construed as referring to a shared range of values (Seglow, 1998). This claim is advanced by advocates of independence when they argue that Scotland, in contrast to the rest of the UK, is essentially a ‘social democratic nation’ interested in the sort of redistributive policies advocated by Miller (see Salmond, 2013). Yet the claim that the Scottish cultural nation is substantially to the left of the rest of the UK is not borne out by the evidence (see Curtice & Ormston, 2011; Keating, 2010). Even if such moral/political differences could be established, they might distinguish Scotland from the rest of the UK taken as a whole, but not from all other communities within it, such as the North East of England.

12. This would require positing that there are two parallel ‘cultural nations’ which both influence individual understandings but not each other, and that it is only the ‘values’ element of the cultural nation that has the relevant causal effects. We hold that this atomistic account of meaning is in and of itself untenable (Bevir, 1999). In any event, all of the problems for the cultural nationalist account noted below, which flow from the socially constructed nature of cultures, would apply to both aspects of the cultural nation.

13. This is not to reduce Kymlicka’s entire theory of multiculturalism to this one claim nor to imply that he is only interested in defending rights for national groups. Nevertheless his account of culture as a context of meaningful choice underpins both his cultural nationalism and his defence of multiculturalism more broadly.

14. We are not claiming that most cultural nationalists would articulate their position in terms of the strong version of the claim. Indeed, in so far as the strong claim requires that cultures do not change and individuals cannot move between them, cultural nationalists such as Kymlicka explicitly reject it. Arguably, however, cultural nationalism in general – and Kymlicka specifically – is implicitly committed to something like the strong claim if it is to avoid collapsing into a cosmopolitan position (see below). In any event, the point here is that a philosophical analysis of the strong version of the claim undercuts the more plausible moderate and weak versions of cultural nationalism.

15. See Bevir (1999) Chapter 2 for our underlying account of meaning and pp. 198ff for a detailed examination of the issue of cultural limits.

16. It is important to distinguish this from the claim that it is a conceptual necessity that individuals are socialized into (and reason against) a broad background of meaningful cultural material, which we accept. We object to the stronger claim that it is a conceptual necessity that individuals are located within a single cultural framework, and that their individual understandings cannot go beyond this framework in any circumstances.

17. Kymlicka accepts the possibility of movement but he argues it is difficult and painful, and so individuals should be assumed to want to remain in their own culture. He considers the role of a societal culture as a context of meaningful choice and the bond with our culture to be separate claims (see Kymlicka, 1995, pp. 83–94), but the implication of the arguments developed here is that the distinction may be illusory. Ashcroft (in press) argues that Kymlicka’s overall theory commits him to a ‘strong’ cultural nationalism, mainly via his need to locate individuals in only one societal culture as a shared context of meaningful choice at any one time. This is a presupposition of his luck egalitarian attempt to equalize cultures as (unchosen) contexts of meaningful choice. This in turn creates the need to identify and bound cultures in such a way as to raise the problems of essentialism and reification we discuss below. In any event, if the claim that we are located in a single societal culture as our context of meaningful choice is not tenable on the terms in which it is stated, Kymlicka has lost the central plank of his core argument, and must rely on the link between self-respect, identity, and culture to do all of the work in grounding his multiculturalism.

18. This possibility is raised, albeit disparagingly, by Waldron (1991). It is analysed in depth in Ashcroft (in press).

19. They must be wrong about the nature and content in several senses: (i) reification is to mistake a social construction for a natural kind; (ii) the reification will likely be an abstracted generalization of the culture that ignores the plethora of individual interpretations that constitute it; and (iii) to have the posited beneficial effects re deliberation and choice, individuals must assume a commonality of understanding that is likely illusory or partial.

20. See Brock (2013) and Benhabib and Post (2006) for a series of useful discussions.

21. Those who offer a strong account of morality as based in associative duties, like Miller, would reject our cosmopolitan presumption. On the other hand, those who argue for a cosmopolitanism based in a universalism committed to inter alia a robust account of autonomy, like Abizadeh, would likely reject the form of our cosmopolitanism. A full discussion of associative duties and different forms of cosmopolitanism is beyond the scope of this paper, however (see Ashcroft, in press).

22. We leave open the criteria for deciding whether a form of organization is ‘voluntary’, although a substantive right of exit is perhaps a necessary condition. See the paper by Fagan in this volume for a discussion of these issues and also Kukathas (2003) and Ashcroft (in press).

23. See Bevir (2000b) for the distinction between the unbounded ethical community and the discrete organizations that may attempt to instantiate it. This distinction allows for greater freedom of association than most other post-national cosmopolitanisms, including the potential to close internal and external ‘borders’.

24. We say this without prejudice to the potential claims of other minority nations such as the Cornish.

25. For instance, retaining access to the EEA – which would likely require accepting substantial free movement of people and goods – would retain important aspects of polycentricity in economic and cultural terms, even if there is no participation in European political institutions.