ABSTRACT
With the new wave of populism and nationalism, multicultural political theory has fallen on hard times, and is currently subject to heavy attack from both politicians and academics. Yet the wind was blowing in the opposite direction until recently. Starting with the 1970s and 1980s, the multicultural discourse and policies became widely popular and were adopted in a variety of states such as the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, Australia, and the United States. 1 International and supranational organizations, including the UN, the EU, the World Bank, and the International Labour Organization, gradually encouraged the adoption of policies that recognized and protected ethno-cultural minorities and indigenous groups (Kymlicka 2007: Chapter 7; Phillips 2007; Eisenberg 2014). These political-legal developments were accompanied and supported by the crystallization of multiculturalism centred on the questions: why is cultural difference relevant for political philosophy? What are the nature, the forms, and the limits of recognition of cultural particularities in a constitutional democracy?
