Ethnocultural Minorities in Liberal Democracies

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Ethnocultural Minorities in Liberal Democracies

• Raphael Cohen-Almagor
• University of Haifa, ISRAEL
• Will Kymlicka
• Queen's University, CANADA

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Preliminaries

• How are group rights related to individual
  rights?
• What should we do if group rights come into
  conflict with individual rights?

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• Can a liberal democracy allow minority groups to
  restrict the individual rights of their members,
  or should it insist that all groups uphold
  liberal principles?

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self- and other-regarding conduct

• cases in which one is inflicting pain or death
  upon oneself vs. cases in which one is inflicting
  damage upon others

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• Jainas practice in relation to the dying
• scarring

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Two kinds of rights

• internal restrictions - right of a group
  against its own members
• external protections - right of a group against
  the larger society

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Murder for family honour

• Some norms are considered by liberal standards to
  be intrinsically wrong, wrong by their very
  nature
• Such are norms that result in physical harm to
  women and babies

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• External protections are defensible when groups
  seek to protect their identity by limiting their
  vulnerability to the decisions of the larger
  society

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• reserving land for the exclusive use of a
  minority group
• Guaranteeing representation for a minority on
  advisory or legislative bodies
• Devolving power to local levels

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Unjust claims for external protections

• Apartheid

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• whereas internal restrictions are almost
  inherently in conflict with liberal democratic
  norms, external protections are not as long as
  they promote equality between groups, rather than
  allowing one group to dominate or oppress another

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Pueblo Indians communities

• discriminate against members who have abandoned
  the traditional tribal religion in the
  distribution of housing
• discriminate against women who have married
  outside the tribe

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The Nature of Liberal Tolerance

• Rawls conceptions that directly conflict with
  the principles of justice, or that wish to
  control the machinery of state and practices so
  as to coerce the citizenry by employing effective
  intolerance should be excluded

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• no social world exists that does not exclude some
  ways of life that realize in special ways some
  essential values

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• comprehensive doctrines vs. reasonable
  comprehensive doctrines

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• democratic society is characterized not simply by
  a pluralism of comprehensive religious,
  philosophical, and moral doctrines but by
  pluralism of incompatible yet reasonable
  comprehensive doctrines

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internalized coercion vs. designated coercion

• Unlike the internalized coercion, designated
  coercion is not concerned with a machinery aiming
  to convince the entire cultural group of an
  irrefutable truth

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Halizah

• Judaism vs. liberalism collective vs. individual
  autonomy

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"millet system"

• a group-based form of toleration, which did not
  recognize any principle of individual freedom of
  conscience

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Hofer vs. Hofer

• people have a basic interest in their capacity to
  form and revise their conception of the good

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• the power of religious communities over their own
  members must be such that individuals can freely
  and effectively exercise that capacity

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Conclusions

• relevant factors in deciding when intervention
  is warranted
• the severity of rights violations within the
  minority community
• the extent to which formalized dispute resolution
  mechanisms exist within the community

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• the extent to which these mechanisms are seen as
  legitimate by group members
• the ability of dissenting group members to leave
  the community if they so desire

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• the existence of historical agreements which base
  the national minoritys claim for some sort of
  autonomy

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• Developing a liberal theory of minority rights is
  of the utmost importance for the future of
  liberal democracies, particularly for newly
  democratizing countries in Eastern Europe, Asia
  and Africa