Review of International Studies (1998), 24, 307–319 Copyright © British International Studies Association

307

* This essay is based on the twelfth E. H. Carr Memorial Lecture delivered at the University of Wales,Aberystwyth on 1 May 1997. E. H. Carr was Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Politicsthere from 1936 to 1947.

1 This is made explicit in John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA, 1971), e.g., p. 8.2 Ibid.

The limits of cultural politics*B R I A N B A R RY

Abstract. This article argues against a recent development within anglo-phone politicalphilosophy which treats almost all group conflicts as deriving from cultural differences, thusdownplaying the notion that conflicts may simply be over the distribution of things to whichall the participants attach value: power, money, land and so on. Normative politicalphilosophy, it is claimed by those who take this view, should be primarily concerned withissues of identity, recognition and culture at the expense of issues concerning distribution.There is however, little basis for these claims, whose implications are sketched in here andform the foundation for a defence of a liberalism ‘that has confidence in its own insights, aliberalism possessed of clarity as well as compassion.’

I begin with the commonplace observation that the liberal conception of thepolity currently faces a variety of changes. Fundamental to this liberal conception isthe idea of a single and undifferentiated grade of citizenship, expressing itself inidentical legal and political rights. Since all votes are supposed to count equallyunder such a system, the ultimate validation of collective decisions is majoritarian.This is consistent with the existence of political subunits within a state, but the basicassumption holds that internal boundaries should reflect administrative conveniencerather than a shared history, culture and aspirations. Thus, following the FrenchRevolution, the ancient divisions of the country were dismantled and replaced by amore or less rectangular grid of départements, roughly equal in size regardless oftheir population. A further assumption is that state boundaries are relativelyimpermeable, and that citizens will normally be born, grow up, live and die within asingle state.1 Under these circumstances, the state claims a loyalty overriding anymore limited ones, such as to family, class, religion or ethnic group, and is alsosuspicious of loyalties that extend beyond its boundaries.

In return for this primary loyalty, the state undertakes to sustain a system ofequitable law and order and to provide public goods and services. In the postwarWestern European version common to both main political tendencies, socialdemocracy and Christian democracy, it also provides economic security in the faceof such contingencies as youth, age, disability and unemployment. In typical Owl ofMinerva fashion, this whole conception received its most systematic exposition in ATheory of Justice, which was written in 1971.2 This, of course, is the very time when

it might be argued that its utility as a charter of a politically organized society(which is the way Rawls presents the theory) was becoming increasingly problematic.

Some of these problems arise from international developments: globalizationappears to threaten the ability of states to secure full employment, to provideeconomic security and to redistribute wealth according to shared norms. To put itpessimistically, states have not lost their capacity to do bad things (torture,‘disappearances’ and even genocide), but their capacity to do good things. In thisarticle, I shall concentrate on the other source of difficulty for the model of liberalcitizenship. This takes the form of a challenge to the model itself. The idea ofuniform rules applying equally to all and decided upon by some majoritarianprocedure encompassing all citizens is currently under attack in the name ofmulticulturalism and multinationalism.

******

Construed as a programme rather than as a description, ‘multiculturalism’ is, it seemsto me, a potentially misleading way of describing claims made on behalf of a veryheterogeneous series of groups with very heterogeneous objectives. Endemic in theliterature of multiculturalism is the tendency to suggest that all social groups aredifferentiated by culture, and have distinctive outlooks, aspirations and priorities.3

This ‘culturalization’ of group conflicts in many cases provides a misleading analysisof what is at issue. For example, those who object to being discriminated against ineducation or employment on grounds of race, gender or sexual preference maysimply be demanding an equal opportunity to achieve exactly the same general goodsthat others desire. They may also have distinctive outlooks, aspirations and priorities,but they may not; and, even if they do, they may regard these (unlike discrimination)as being matters for personal choice with no implications for public policy.

However, even if the reach of multiculturalism is not as broad as some of itsexponents imply, there are undeniably in almost all contemporary liberal societies anumber of groups that are differentiated on bases such as religion and deep-seatedcultural beliefs and practices. The multiculturalist objection to the liberal model ofcitizenship is, then, that the equal treatment it promises is not really equal and thatits claim to impartiality conceals a tendency to penalize cultural minorities. Evenwhere a piece of legislation has manifestly benign purposes—the prevention of headinjuries to motorcyclists or of cruelty to animals, for example—it is liable to beregarded as unfair by the partisans of multiculturalism if it has a differential impacton people as a result of their distinctive beliefs or practices.

One way—and an increasingly popular way—of conceiving of multinationalism isto treat it as a special case of multiculturalism. On this understanding of it, a nationis defined primarily in cultural terms, and where its members form a majority withinsome territory the claim is made that they should be able to exercise politicalauthority so as to preserve and strengthen the culture. Although this approach to theanalysis of nationality is now dominant among the academic supporters ofnationalism, it is curiously at odds with the way in which real-life nationalists pitchtheir claims. Real nationalists typically regard a nation as (notionally) a descentgroup: one becomes a member of a nation purely by being born into it. Of course,

308 Brian Barry

3 See, e.g., Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ, 1990), pp. 43, 186.

there must be criteria of nationality, such as religion, language or just residence inan area going back some generations. However, the significance of these is to serveas markers of membership in the descent group. The other feature present in mostreal-life nationalism is the idea that a nation has the right to control a certainterritory, whether or not it is currently actually in control of that territory.

In a recent article, Lea Brilmayer has argued that political philosophers arestrangely silent about this ‘blood-and-soil’ nationalism.4 I entirely agree about this,and I agree that this has a distorting effect on what they do say about it. Where Ipart company with Brilmayer is in her suggestion that others have not taken thisseriously enough normatively; in other words that claims made on a basis of blood-and-soil nationalism should be addressed on a serious basis. According to her,adjudicating blood-and-soil type claims is difficult but not impossible, However, Icannot seriously imagine a panel of jurists and political philosophers reachingdecisions based on such claims.

Thus, representatives of the present Israeli Government might go along to thecourt envisaged by Brilmayer and make the claim that God had given the land ofIsrael to the Jews, and that this justified its policy of refusing to implement the OsloAccords and steadily expropriating Palestinian land in (what it would call) Judeaand Samaria. No doubt this could be supported by wheeling in a barrowload ofBiblical exegesis. But what would this tribunal do in the face of objectors whodenied the existence of God, acknowledged His existence but claimed He had beenmisreported, or refused to accept that God had the authority to promise land in thisway? (The authority of His Vicar to divide the New World between between Spainand Portugal was, it may be recalled, similarly challenged in earlier times, not onlyby those whose territory was parcelled out but by other Europeans.)

Claims based on geography would be equally incapable of assessment. Irishnationalists could produce a map to show that Ireland is undeniably an island. Buthow would that prove that it should be one state? The Italian Government couldexhibit a model in relief to show that, if the boundaries of Italy are to constitute thewhole of the peninsula up to the Alps, they are in the right place. But how couldthat withstand a challenge from German-speakers in the Tyrol who wished to denythat geography is fate?

Historically based claims would fare no better. Every country in Central Europe,for example, would make claims to what it regarded as its national territory. Theseclaims could be defended by producing evidence that the (supposed) ancestors of itsdominant national group had at some time in the past controlled this territory, orperhaps merely controlled different bits at different times. But these claims would, ofcourse, in many cases be to the same areas, and the claims would be equally good—or equally bad.

That the claims made by blood-and-soil nationalists are blatantly self-serving andcannot conceivably be expected to be accepted by anybody else does not, of course,prevent them from being politically efficacious within the group. Indeed, the verysimplicity of the structure of blood-and-soil arguments, while rendering them un-convincing to outsiders, at the same time makes them irrefutable. There is noquestion that these arguments are incompatible with liberal premises, but they

Limits of cultural politics 309

4 Lea Brilmayer, ‘The Moral Significance of Nationalism’, Notre Dame Law Review, 71 (1995),pp. 7–73.

cannot be deemed to represent a challenge to liberalism in any intellectuallyinteresting sense. All that can be said is that they fail to connect up with any intel-ligible account of the welfare of individuals, and that the notion of collectiveentitlements to which they appeal cannot be accommodated by liberal ideas ofjustice.

The ‘national territory’ of a successful blood-and-soil nationalist movement willalmost invariably include within the state boundaries people who are not membersof the dominant national group. These may be members of other nationalities(which may or may not have a state in which their co-nationals are dominant) orthey may be members of a socially distinct group that is not a nationality, such asthe Roma. The crucial point to grasp about blood-and-soil nationalism is that it isnot a universalistic doctrine asserting that every nation should have a territory of itsown. Rather, in as far as it is universalistic, its universal principle is (as Brilmayerdescribes it) that people should get what they are entitled to. But ‘what people are(collectively) entitled to’ is to control a national territory underwritten by theology,geography or history. There is, therefore, no inconsistency, as is sometimes alleged, inZionists denying that the Palestinians have a right to an independent state of theirown, so long as the case for the existence of Israel is made on blood-and-soil linesand not represented as a theorem of universalistic nationalism.

******

There is a widely held view that blood-and-soil nationalism is characteristicallyCentral European and can be contrasted with the nationalism of Western Europe.However, the idea of a national territory and a Staatsvolk with a right to control it isfar more pervasive than that would suggest. To the extent that it exists in a country,it is normally seen by members of the national group that ‘owns’ the country aslegitimizing their monopolization of political power. This may be achieved formallyby reserving citizenship to them, or by creating de facto first-class and second-classcitizens. This division was displayed in its most murderous form in formerYugoslavia: ‘The central conflict which destabilized Yugoslavia was between, on theone hand, the desire to create or consolidate (in the case of Serbia) a state in whichone national group was dominant, and on the other, the perceived or demonstrablevulnerability of minority populations in these projected states.’5 But the idea that astate is ‘for’ only a part of its population is liable to have malign consequenceseverywhere in the form of political exclusion and discriminatory public policies.

Thus, a prime minister of the micro-quasi-state of Northern Ireland once declaredit to be ‘a Protestant state for a Protestant people’, despite the presence within itsborders of a one-third Catholic minority. One-party Protestant rule guaranteed thatthe minority, despite having the vote, was totally excluded from power. In Israel,whose avowed raison d’être is to be ‘a Jewish state for a Jewish people’, the exclusionof the Palestinian minority from a share in power is achieved in a different butequally effective way. Although the electoral system is highly proportional, partiespredominantly supported by non-Jewish citizens are omitted from the process ofcoalition formation that is the lifeblood of Israeli politics. Public policy in NorthernIreland before the ‘Troubles’ was notoriously biased in favour of the majority

310 Brian Barry

5 Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia (London, 1992), p. 177.

community, and in Israel too there are respects in which the Jewish populationoccupies a relatively privileged position.

All this is quite straightforwardly contrary to the liberal theory of citizenshipwhich (as we have seen) posits equal treatment as fundamental. But it is not, I wishto insist, an intellectually interesting challenge, however important it may be as acause of institutions that violate liberal precepts. On the contrary, a recognition ofthe consequences of repudiating the liberal conception should give liberals a strongreason for reaffirming their commitment. The ‘cultural’ nationalism of the academicpolitical theorists is more of an intellectual challenge, because it can claim to be agenuinely universal principle (a ‘right to national culture’ for all) and because it isput forward as a more sophisticated way of achieving the liberal end of equaltreatment. However, because the nationalism of the political theorists articulates sopoorly with popular nationalism, they find themselves attached to movements thatdo not fit their model.

Thus, the two causes dearest to the hearts of contemporary academic nationalistsare those of Israel (e.g., Michael Walzer and Yael Tamir) and Quebec (e.g., CharlesTaylor and Will Kymlicka).6 Yet the phenomena in these two cases obstinately fail tofit the ‘cultural’ model. Thus, the very existence of Israel in its present location isinexplicable in the absence of the idea that a self-defined descent group can lay claimto a national territory even if it is many generations since those that it regards as itsancestors occupied it. Such claims are the stuff of blood-and-soil nationalism: agood current example is the Serbian claim on Kosovo, with its predominantly ethnicAlbanian Muslim population, based on its significance to Serbs as the site of theholiest Serbian Orthodox shrine, and the former occupation of the area by Serbs.

Another puzzle for the ‘cultural’ model of nationhood is that the founders ofcontemporary Israel were not interested in perpetuating the Jewish religion (most ofthem were secular) or the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe from which most ofthem came (hence the decision to recreate Hebrew rather than make Yiddish thenational language). It may be said, of course, that there is now an Israeli culture forthe state to defend. But it would be hard to maintain that the preservation of thisculture has anything to do with the disadvantages in access to land, housing andpublic services suffered by the minority. Finally, the ‘law of return’ defines the rightto settle in Israel and become an Israeli citizen in purely ethnic terms and notcultural terms. (In requiring no affinity with Israeli culture or knowledge of Hebrew,it is parallel to the German provision for automatic citizenship, which demandsproof of German ancestry but does not call for knowledge of German language orculture.) All this makes perfect sense from within the blood-and-soil perspective, butnot otherwise.

Limits of cultural politics 311

6 Michael Walzer’s notion of a state as the guarantor of a national culture pervades all his work; see,e.g., Spheres of Justice (New York, 1983). Yael Tamir’s Liberal Nationalism (Princeton, NJ, 1993, rptwith new preface 1995) explicitly points out that ‘in [her] account of nationalism the termsmulticulturalism and multinationalism can be interchangeable’ (p. xvii) in virtue of ‘a culturaldefinition of the term “nation”’ (p. 8). Similarly, Will Kymlicka’s ‘culturalization’ of nationalism isembodied in the title of his book Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford, 1995), which is actually aboutrelations between groups of different national origins in the United States and Canada. CharlesTaylor has acknowledged a debt to Johann Herder, for whom language and culture definenationhood, and has deployed these ideas voluminously in defence of Quebec nationalism. The bookI cite below is, again significantly, entitled Multiculturalism and the ‘Politics of Recognition’, ed. AmyGutmann (Princeton, NJ, 1992).

Similarly, despite the unique degree to which Quebec nationalism has beeninfluenced by academic ‘cultural’ nationalism, it still requires a lot of hard work tomake the reality fit that model better than the blood-and-soil model. Thus, if theconcern were exclusively for the integrity of French language and culture, anindependent Quebec would not merely accept but welcome the loss of those areasoccupied by anglophones and native Americans. Yet Quebec nationalists are un-willing to give up any territory, even parts ceded to Quebec by the Dominiongovernment in 1898 and 1912.7 (This, incidentally, illustrates the tendency for the‘national territory’ to be defined so as to cover the largest area ever controlled by thenational group.)

The proposal for local referenda allowing for a decision to opt into or out of anindependent Quebec, modelled on the way in which the Swiss handled the divisionof Canton Berne, has been derided as appropriate only to the ‘pays de gruyère’.8 Buteven if the anglophone enclaves in western Montreal and the Eastern Townships(contiguous with the United States but not the rest of Canada) were incorporated inan independent Quebec, a large anglophone area along the western border and aneven larger (though lightly populated) area in the north-west with a native Americanmajority could be ceded without compromising the territorial integrity of theremaining area. If the gruyère objection were the only one, it would not hold in thesecases. The resistance to the opportunity to create a more linguistically and culturallypure Quebec is quite understandable, however, if the current boundaries are taken tocomprise the national territory, and the national majority is taken to have a validclaim to the whole of the national territory.

As far as the language is concerned, there can, of course, be no question but thatspeakers of French should be able to be educated (to the highest level), have accessto a wide array of occupational opportunities, and conduct their relations withgovernment in French. The rationale for this has the implication that the sameshould be guaranteed to the anglophone minority. However, it is hard to see why theFrench language should die out so long as French speakers choose to use French inprivate and public. The pedantic thoroughness of the legislation that puts English inan officially subordinate position makes more sense, I suggest, if understood as away of asserting ethnic superiority (with language as the marker dividingcommunities) rather than as a response to any such threat.

In Northern Ireland the fault-line between the communities is a history ofconquest, and the Protestant ‘marching season’ is a not very subtle reminder of thathistory. In Quebec, the fault-line is language, and linguistic legislation the formtaken by the symbolic politics of ethnic superiority. Charles Taylor has argued thatthere are no ‘fundamental rights to things like commercial signage in the language ofone’s choice’.9 (The issue alluded to here was whether, given that all shop signsshould be in French, it should be permissible for signs to be in English as well orwhether public signs in English should be banished altogether.) Perhaps it couldequally well be said that there is no fundamental right not to have the members of acommunity whose ancestors defeated yours march down your street in fancy dresswhile playing pipes and drums to celebrate these ancient victories. But in both cases,

312 Brian Barry

7 Scott J. Reid, ‘The Borders of an Independent Quebec: A Thought Experiment’, The Good Society(PEGS), 7 (1997), pp. 11–17.

8 Ibid., p. 15.9 Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism, p. 59.

the very unreasonableness, amounting to absurdity, of the majority action makes it asymbol of raw power, a daily or recurrent demonstration of political superiority.

The practice of marching might, indeed, be defended as an aspect of the majoritygroup’s culture, and it is amusing to observe that the language of culture haspenetrated even the ranks of hardline Ulster loyalists. In the face of a long-overdueproposal by the British Government to set up a commission to regulate marches(instead of leaving it to the Royal Ulster Constabulary) a spokesperson for theOrange Order said, ‘There is nothing in this legislation for us and we reject totallythe thinking that allows our faith, tradition and culture to be treated with suchcontempt.’10 If it were simply a matter of marching through areas in which themarchers were welcome, the practice could perhaps with some stretching be treatedas a harmless cultural tradition. But then it would not need to be regulated, becausethe Catholic minority do not object to marches as such (though they would, in myview, be quite justified in doing so). Problems arise ‘typically where loyalist marcheshave attempted to go through districts which were once predominantly Protestantbut which have over the years become Catholic’.11 What is going on here, then, is anexhibition of microscale blood-and-soil nationalism. As members of the OrangeOrder have in the past told reporters, they feel that by rerouting their marches theywould be publicly recognizing a loss of communal territory.

The Ulster Protestants could, admittedly, claim with perfect accuracy that it ispart of their culture to monopolize political power in the province, and to reinforcethis symbolically by playing the national anthem on every possible occasion, makinglavish use of the royal title and insignia (no other police force in the UK is ‘royal’,for example), and marching through predominantly Catholic areas. No doubt, ifdefenders of the Old South had had access to the currently fashionable vocabulary,they would have explained that their culture (as romanticized in Gone with the Wind)was inextricably linked with the ‘Peculiar Institution’—and they would have beenright. But this simply illustrates that the appeal to ‘culture’ is less than conclusive, tosay the least. All too often, the appeal to culture is an attempt to legitimate eitherthe oppression of one group by another, or the oppression of some members of agroup by others within the group in the name of an internally inegalitarian andilliberal culture.

******

The gravamen of my complaint against academic supporters of multiculturalismand multinationalism is that they have failed to penetrate what is, in essence, anideology in the strict Marxist sense: an otherworldly rationalization of a distastefulreality. Whereas in recent decades historians and social scientists have concentratedon unmasking the pretensions of these movements, political philosophers have beenwilling to act as intellectual accomplices. Nevertheless, I believe that the focus onculture has raised some questions that have characteristically been neglected by theliberal tradition and that need to be addressed. In its simplest form—the form that Ibegan by depicting—liberalism has no theory of political boundaries. Yet it seemsabsurd to suggest that any boundaries are as good as any others, so long as the

Limits of cultural politics 313

10 ‘Anger Greets Ulster March Proposal’, Independent, 18 Oct. 1997, p. 12.11 Ibid.

territories they enclose have liberal institutions. If we take it as given that blood-and-soil nationalism cannot be reconciled with liberalism, it is surely plausible that aliberal account will have to appeal to culture in some shape or form. To this degree,the ‘cultural’ school can be said to be vindicated.

Here again we come up against the importance of language, not this time as anethnic marker (the ‘mother tongue’) but simply as a means of communication. Inearlier times, it was perfectly feasible (as in parts of the Habsburg Empire) for thetowns to be linguistic enclaves surrounded by a peasantry that spoke anotherlanguage. So long as there were some intermediaries and officials that could speakboth languages, life could go on quite satisfactorily for all concerned, so long as theyaccepted the political and economic status quo. But a democratic state requires forits most effective functioning a single public discourse, which entails either a singlelanguage or true bilingualism. The latter is not impossible. It exists, for example, inthe Alto Adige (or Südtirol, depending on which language you speak) in Italy. Butthe conditions for its flourishing are highly peculiar. What is usually called abilingual society is one in which the state offers services in both languages butindividuals are not themselves necessarily bilingual and form communities thatspeak one or other language.

A single polity may contain more than one long-standing linguistic community ofthis kind, because it has been put together in a way that cuts across a linguisticfrontier (or more than one), like Belgium or Switzerland. Alternatively, autoch-thonous communities may have been overrun but not assimilated, as in much of theNew World. In all such cases, forcible imposition of a single language as the onlylegitimate public means of communication would clearly be oppressive. This meansthat liberals must accept certain group rights: the different linguistic communitieshave a valid claim to conduct their collective life in their own language.

However, what must be acknowledged is that this kind of arrangement takes itstoll on the functioning of a democratic regime. If one linguistic group is a minority,it is liable simply to be excluded from the majority discourse and hence mar-ginalized. Even where all linguistic groups count, as in Switzerland and Belgium,what corresponds to ordinary political debate in unilingual countries tends to occurin parallel within the different linguistic communities (almost all Swiss cantons areunilingual), with federal policies brokered by elites in a bargaining process. Theconnection between language and democratic politics seems inexorable: it helps toexplain, for example, the redivision of the Indian states along linguistic lines sinceindependence.

Contemporary liberalism is committed to equality of opportunity. This leaves agreat deal of room for dispute about what equality of opportunity entails. But whatis at any rate fairly clearly a violation of it is a situation in which members ofdifferent groups within a society have systematically different prospects of educa-tional and occupational achievement, even if they have comparable levels of abilityand motivation. The existence of different linguistic communities is compatible withequality of opportunity understood in this way, so long as these communities areable to maintain educational and economic institutions that provide a range ofopportunities of roughly equal value, even if they are not exactly the same oppor-tunities. Belgium and Switzerland both meet these conditions adequately. Thedemands of ‘multiculturalism’ begin to bite only where such conditions are notfulfilled.

314 Brian Barry

Manifestly, a Cree or Inuit in Canada who does not speak English or French is ata severe disadvantage in the national job market. Anyone who wants to integrateinto the mainstream economy will have to learn English or French. But it should benoted that there is no demand for the creation of an entire parallel economy forthose whose only language is that of a native band. What those who choose toidentify with a native American group want is to have a quite different set of optionsfrom those offered in the mainstream economy. They will be satisfied if they have theopportunities that are valuable to them. This calls for measures to give control overthe resources they need for a distinctive way of life, not the creation of a paralleleconomy functioning in their language.

The point to be made here is that nothing in this case carries over to that ofimmigrants. Immigrants to liberal societies are normally attracted by jobopportunities in the mainstream economy: they have no wish to create a completelydistinctive, self-enclosed economy, on the lines of a native American band. There area few exceptions such as the Hutterites and the Amish in North America. Theseraise some questions about equal opportunity in as far as their educational practicesleave those who choose to leave the community at a disadvantage in the mainstreamjob market; but, for those who stay, nobody would regard it as an objection thatmembership is incompatible with a career in banking or nuclear physics. Thesingularity of these cases highlights their difference from that of the general run ofimmigrants.

A claim characteristically made by exponents of multiculturalist pluralism is thatno group should be placed at a disadvantage as a consequence of adhering to itsown distinctive beliefs and practices.12 This is taken by some to imply thatimmigrants and their descendants should be able to retain their original languagewithout suffering educational or occupational disadvantage. Furnishing anythingapproaching equal educational and occupational opportunity would entail con-structing a parallel educational system (up to tertiary level) and a parallel economy.Otherwise, those who do not speak the dominant language will be condemned tomenial jobs in the mainstream economy under the direction of a bilingual super-visor, or to providing services for members of the immigrant community only.

Even where it entails these stunted opportunities, there may well be communityleaders who urge the maintenance of linguistic enclaves. This is, however, moreplausibly seen as an intergenerational conflict of interest within the immigrant groupthan as a straightforward conflict between its interests collectively and those of thehost society. For the older generation, there is the advantage of not having to adapt.In addition, there are for the community leaders the power and other rewards thatcome from being needed as the intermediaries between the ordinary group membersand the political and administrative structures of the wider society. (Charac-teristically, the community leaders do not practise what they preach, in that they arethemselves bilingual.) For the children, there is much less to lose and much more togain from the acquisition of the means of moving freely in the larger society.13

Limits of cultural politics 315

12 See Young, Justice, esp. pp. 168–83.13 Russell Hardin argues that ‘the forc[ible] institutionalization of minor languages as required for

official and business transactions, and other such communally motivated policies, often have as theirsad consequence the fettering of the lives of future generations, who, in a sense, are used by thepresent generations merely to make life a bit more comfortable for themselves’. Russell Hardin, Onefor All: The Logic of Group Conflict (Princeton, NJ, 1995), p. 220.

Liberal societies are committed to the ideal of equal opportunity for all. Now, it istrue that the first generation may well find themselves at a disadvantage if they areunable to become fluent in the language of business and public affairs in their newhome. But many newly arrived immigrants are in any case at a disadvantage as aresult of coming in with an education that restricts their occupational opportunities.It is, I suggest, an unrealistic demand to place on any society that it should provideequal opportunity to newly arrived immigrants, if this entails creating conditionsunder which they will have the same range of occupations open to them as thosewho speak the language in which the mainstream economy operates. Immigrantsthemselves are normally content if their lot has improved over the one that they leftbehind. Where equality of opportunity is relevant is among those who are born andgrow up in the host country. Fortunately, the experience of immigrants all over theworld testifies to the ease with which young children learn the local language, even iftheir parents speak it poorly or not at all. (Indeed, itinerant academics who takeyoung children to a foreign country for just a year are regularly amazed to hearthem rattling away in the local language after a short time.) It is what naturallyhappens in the absence of deliberate attempts by the immigrant community toimpede it, especially where these attempts include the provision of public educationemploying the community’s language as a medium of instruction.

Equality of opportunity is, then, a criterion on which a society can properly bejudged. But it should be construed as an opportunity to acquire the country’slanguage, to achieve educational success in that language, and to gain employmenton the basis of those qualifications without suffering discrimination. These are hardenough objectives to achieve, and most countries of immigration have at best aspotty record in ensuring them. But they are objectives whose validity nobody whoaccepts basic liberal principles can deny. In contrast, the provision of genuineequality of opportunity without linguistic assimilation would be, if not impossible,fantastically burdensome. In practice, the maintenance of linguistic diversity is arecipe for condemning successive generations to dead-end jobs (or unemployment)and inability to take part in public affairs except as voting-fodder for a politics ofsectional interest. The rest of the society has a legitimate direct interest, not only apaternalistic one, in avoiding such an outcome. For it has a legitimate interest in allits citizens’ having the capacity to be economically productive and being equipped totake part in its national politics on an individual basis.

Where language is concerned, a state cannot adopt a neutral stance: it mustprovide its services in one or more languages, decide if a linguistic test for employ-ment is to count as illegal discrimination, and so on. At the same time, however, itcan be said of language as of no other cultural trait, that it is a matter of con-vention. No doubt every language has its own singular excellencies, but any languagewill do as the medium of communication in a society so long as everybody speaks it.This is the one case involving cultural attributes in which ‘This is how we do thingshere’—the appeal to local convention—is a self-sufficient response to pleas for thepublic recognition of diversity.

Charles Taylor is quite right to say that, in general, saying no more than ‘This ishow we do things here’ would be crude and insensitive.14 If it were the only reasonoffered for holding to uniform laws that make no exceptions for those whose culture

316 Brian Barry

14 Taylor, ‘Politics of Recognition’, p. 63.

or religion would result in their being inconvenienced by these laws, it certainly wouldbe very inadequate. But only an unargued relativism leaves us with nothing betweenthat and a multiculturalist ‘politics of recognition’. What both of these alternativeshave in common is that they assume there to be nothing except ‘my culture’ and ‘yourculture’. It is not even ‘My culture, right or wrong’, because that still presupposesthat right and wrong can have a content independent of culture. Rather, it is ‘Myculture provides the measure of what is right for me, and yours does the same foryou.’ Each culture is a moral monad. This is, manifestly, the pluralization of theromantic nationalist idea of the incommensurability of national moralities.

******

Liberals must thus resist the multiculturalists’ false dichotomy. For one culture to beimposed simply because its bearers have the power to do so is bad. But there is noreason for thinking that it is any better simply to say that the different culturalgroups should fight it out in the political arena. Indeed, unless that arena can betightly constrained by rules of the game it may be a lot worse. What is lacking inboth scenarios is any notion of a principled resolution of group conflict. That wouldbe, as postmodernist cant has it, ‘monological’, which is merely to say that it wouldbe somebody’s view about the substantive right answer, rather than a vacuous appealto ‘dialogue’. The same substitution of process for substance gives rise to the equallyabsurd, and potentially lethal, notion that something called a ‘peace process’ cansomehow bring about peace in the absence of any agreement on what the terms of ajust peace might be.

In any political system open to lobbying, it is quite understandable that well-organized groups will often be able to obtain special concessions for their members.If there is (as is commonly the case) no similarly well-organized group on the otherside, governments and legislatures are naturally tempted to take the path of leastresistance and cave in to these group demands. But such ad hoc concessions may welllack any coherent rationale. Liberals should have the courage of their universalisticconvictions and insist that it makes sense to seek for principled solutions to groupconflicts. At the minimum, they can reasonably demand that policies should becapable of passing a test for internal consistency. I believe that the exemptions forcultural minorities commonly cited by partisans of multiculturalism fail this elemen-tary requirement. In a nutshell, my contention is that there are sometimes goodreasons (whether everybody accepts them or not) for having laws that prohibitcertain kinds of conduct. If the reasons are strong enough, then exceptions shouldnot be made for anybody; conversely, if a good case can be made for saying thatexceptions should be granted, this suggests that the reasons for having the law in thefirst place are inadequate.

Let me illustrate with the two examples that I mentioned in passing earlier, bothof which are widely cited as the kind of thing there should be more of. ‘Under theSlaughter of Poultry Act (1967) and the Slaughterhouses Act (1979), Jews andMuslims may slaughter poultry and animals in abattoirs according to theirtraditional methods.’15 ‘Traditional methods’ is a euphemism for bleeding animals to

Limits of cultural politics 317

15 Bhikhu Parekh, ‘The Rushdie Affair: Research Agenda for Political Philosophy’, Political Studies, 38(1990), pp. 695–709, at p. 704.

death while they are conscious, rather than stunning them prior to killing them, as isotherwise required. Now it can be argued that, just as the decision to eat meat at allis left to the individual conscience, decisions about the way in which animals arekilled should be left to the conscience of the consumer. This argument is parallel tothat used to oppose the prohibition of blood sports, another culturally validatedcustom central to the lives (and livelihoods) of a minority. The implication would bethat meat should be labelled with information about the way in which the animalwas killed but that there should be no other kind of regulation beyond that entailedby considerations of hygiene. Alternatively, the case can be assimilated to the ban oncockfighting and dogfighting, customs in their time equally deep-rooted but prohi-bited nonetheless on animal welfare grounds. Taking this line, the implication wouldbe that there is a certain point beyond which cruelty to animals is a legitimate matterfor collective decision-making, and that kosher/halal butchery is over that line.

Second, ‘under the Motor-cycle Crash-helmet Act (1976), Sikhs are excused fromwearing crash helmets provided they are wearing turbans’.16 Again, it is possible tomake an argument that uniformity should be brought about by repealing the Act. Itcan, obviously, be said against it that it is paternalistic legislation, and that if peoplechoose not to wear crash helmets the resultant injuries are (literally) on their ownheads. Libertarians may object on principle to having to adhere to such a law, and somay those for whom the thrills of riding a motorcycle at high speed are severelycompromised. (A former colleague in North America assured me that nothingmatches riding a Harley-Davidson at full throttle down a deserted freeway, and thata bare head is essential to the value of the experience.) But there is, of course, thecompeting argument that it is a valid aim of public policy to reduce the number ofparaplegic, quadriplegic and permanently comatose young men (as most victims are)in the neurological wards of the hospitals. But if this is a valid objective, it is validacross the board. That the law will result in some people who would otherwise haveridden motorcycles not doing so is not a good reason for making an exception intheir case.

******

To sum up, much group conflict does not arise from different beliefs or preferencesbut simply reflects a struggle for positional advantage, defined in terms of access togoods that are valued by all the parties. The groups may be distinguished by cultureto some degree, but in these cases culture is not what is at stake. If a man and awoman or a white and a black who have the same qualifications fare differently inthe job market, that is simply old-fashioned discrimination of the kind that liberalprinciples are well equipped to condemn. If we leave these cases on one side, we areleft with those in which cultural differences are genuinely relevant. Some of thesewill also be straightforward cases of discrimination: unequal treatment in anundeniable sense. Thus, a blasphemy law that protects Christianity but not otherreligions is discriminatory on its face. A liberal will of course say that the crime ofblasphemy should be abolished rather than that its protection should be extended toall religions—and perhaps, to be completely fair, also extended to avoid offence tothe susceptibilities of atheists.

318 Brian Barry

16 Ibid.

Finally, we have cases in which laws and rules that are not discriminatory on theirface nevertheless have differential impact on people as a result of their distinctivereligious beliefs, culturally rooted practices and norms, and so on. This is the kind ofcase in which exponents of multiculturalism argue for special exemptions. I havesuggested that the examples normally cited in this context are not good ones. Ifthere is a sufficiently compelling reason for having the law in the first place, itsinconveniencing some people (for whatever reason) is not a basis on whichexemptions should be granted. The fact is that almost all laws are more burdensometo some people than to others. The paradigmatic liberal achievement of freedom ofworship manifestly suits those whose religious beliefs are compatible with it betterthan those whose beliefs commit them to the imposition of a religious orthodoxy. Alaw prohibiting drink-driving does not bother non-drinkers, a law against paedo-philia restrains only those inclined to it, and so on. So long as there are sufficientlygood reasons for having uniform laws, their having a differential impact is no reasonfor making exceptions to them.17

This, of course, presupposes that there are such things as good reasons, not justmy reasons and your reasons. But that is the price we pay for living together in asociety bound by overarching norms of civility, and in a world that has the moralresources needed to call brutish regimes to account. ‘Deference to the autonomy ofother beliefs, other values, other cultures has become an all-too-easy alibi for moralisolation. When we need action, we get hand-wringing. When we need forthright-ness, we get equivocation. We need a liberalism that has confidence in its owninsights, a liberalism possessed of clarity as well as compassion.’18

Limits of cultural politics 319

17 Rawls articulated the point fundamental to a liberal theory of justice when he wrote that ‘equalcitizenship defines a general point of view’ and that ‘many questions of social policy [as well as thoseinvolving basic rights] can be considered from this position’, including ‘reasonable regulations tomaintain public order and security or efficient measures for public safety’. Rawls, Theory of Justice,p. 97. As Rawls makes clear, what this means is that questions of distributive justice are out of placehere, even if policies have incidental distributive effects.

18 Henry Louis Gates, Jr, ‘Ethics and Ethnicity’, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,51 (1997), pp. 36–53, at p. 47.