Unequal but fair? Cultural recognition and self-government rights

Abstract

This review of Patten’s Equal Recognition suggests that minority rights can be grounded either in cultural accommodation rights or collective self-government rights. I defend four propositions: (1) individuals’ interests in membership in political communities cannot be reduced to their interests in being able to pursue their own conceptions of the good; (2) liberal states do not have to extend neutrality as equal treatment to self-government claims that intersect with their own jurisdiction; (3) claims for the establishment of public languages and territorial autonomy need to be justified on the basis of self-government rights rather than on grounds of equal treatment of cultural identities; (4) as a condition for their admission, immigrants can be expected to waive collective self-government rights rather than cultural protection rights.

Keywords:

• liberal culturalism
• self-government rights
• language rights
• minority rights
• immigration
• neutrality
• conceptions of the good

Notes

1. I do not want to take a stance here on whether weak forms of public support or promotion of religion are compatible with liberal neutrality and thus permissible from a liberal perspective. There are contexts in which a weak and pluralized form of public recognition for religion may be preferable to full neutrality. My only claim here is that there is no inherent tension between liberal neutrality with regard to religious conceptions of the good, on the one hand, and public recognition of equal citizenship and democratic self-government, on the other hand.

2. For lack of space I cannot fully discuss Patten’s theory of secession (ER, chapter 7). I believe that his cultural neutrality argument should commit him to support a primary right to secession, whereas his intuition that national minorities have moral duties to preserve the integrity of multinational federations in which they enjoy substantive self-government can be much more straightforwardly supported by a requirement to balance the recognition of self-government claims of all citizens of the wider polity with those of autonomous territories inside the state.

3. Since Patten considers neutrality as a ‘downstream value’ in relation to many other liberal values (ER, pp. 108, 109), it is unlikely that he would commit to such a view. I explore it merely as a possible line of defense.

4. Note that regarding cultural minority establishment rights as derivative in this sense does not downgrade them to merely transitional arrangements in the way that Patten thinks Levy’s theory does (ER, p. 17); mutual recognition of self-government rights between majorities and minorities is a permanent feature of democratic constitutions in plurinational states.