ABSTRACT
It is increasingly argued that states have a duty to protect minority cultures. This view reflects, as we’ve seen, the growing influence of the politics of ‘difference,’ where individuals are understood as bearing incommensurable identities based on race, ethnicity or gender. It also reflects the upsurge in demands for national self-determination, be it from indigenous peoples, Catalans, Scots or Quebecois. The influence of these developments is such that cultural rights might be viewed as a logical extension of the citizenship rights that enable citizens to be fully participating members of political communities. In the 1960s, Marshall claimed that twentieth-century ‘social rights’ to health, welfare and employment complemented nineteenth-century ‘political rights’ to the vote and to freedom of expression, which in turn extended the eighteenth-century model of ‘civil rights’ to fair judicial procedures.1 Should cultural rights be understood as one more step in this process? Whereas Rawls attempts to accommodate the politics of difference by narrowing liberalism’s scope, Kymlicka urges a different strategy: he contends that cultural bias is inevitable to some extent and that this requires special arrangements for cultural minorities. The upshot might seem quite unRawlsian, but it remains that Kymlicka’s multicultural liberalism affirms the Rawlsian project of state neutrality.2 This chapter considers liberal arguments for, as Kymlicka puts it, ‘group-differentiated citizenship’3 and argues that the ideas of freedom and equality intrinsic to citizenship rights tell against extending rights to minority cultures in the absence of some normative assessment of the culture in question. Citizens should be understood to have an entitlement to culture in the broadest sense, as a constituent of equal wellbeing, since their capacity to be self-determining beings depends on a measure of cultural enrichment. Cultural enrichment may require the protection of endangered ways of life – such as those of minority cultures – but only if these cultures do not run afoul of citizens’ wellbeing as autonomous individuals.
