ABSTRACT
Multiculturalism, understood as the assertion of collective rights of minority cultures, has been seen as a response to the tendency of the nation-state to impose a homogenous culture (Kymlicka 2001: 23-7). Kymlicka identifies this as the core assumption of a third stage of the debate on multiculturalism. According to Kymlicka, the first stage, which took place before 1989, subsumed the debate on minority rights within a wider debate between liberals and communitarians. Liberals by and large were presumed to welcome the liberation of individuals from the constraints associated with ascribed membership of minority cultures. Communitarians were presumed to be more sympathetic to minority cultures on the grounds of their general distrust of the liberal conception of the individual. In this debate it was also assumed that minority cultures themselves shared this antipathy to liberalism. The second stage, which Kymlicka discusses under the heading ‘Minority Rights Within a Liberal Framework’, abandoned the assumption that minority cultures are necessarily hostile to liberalism and many of the wider social forces associated with it. It also abandoned the presumed antipathy of liberalism and the liberal state to minority cultures. The debate, according to Kymlicka, focused on why, given these assumptions, minorities might still want minority rights, and what rights should be acknowledged. While welcoming the second stage as a marked improvement on the first stage, Kymlicka claims that it took place under the erroneous supposition of the neutrality of the modern liberal state towards ethno-cultural diversity. The third stage is defined primarily in terms of its challenge to this supposed neutrality and especially to the assumption that
liberal states treat culture in the same way as religion – i.e. as something which people should be free to pursue in their private life, but which is not the concern of the state (so long as they respect the rights of others).
