liberalism and the politics of cultural authenticity - politics, philosophy & economics (2002)

Liberalism and the politics ofcultural authenticity

James JohnsonUniversity of Rochester, USA

abstract In this paper, I consider one possible defense of the presumption, commonamong liberal legal and political theorists, that we should respect culture.Specifically, I examine the view, forcefully articulated by Joseph Carens, thatwe can identify those attachments or practices that are candidates for one oranother form of legal protection by determining whether they are ‘authentic’in the sense that members of some relevant group accept or embrace them asan integral component of their culture. I first sketch in detail Carens’s viewand show that despite appearances his position is central to liberal argumentsthat we should respect culture. Next, I recapitulate the empirical case (thecomplicated cultural politics on the islands of Fiji) that Carens uses as avehicle for his argument. I then challenge the implications that Carens drawsfrom the Fijian case. In particular, I argue that claims to ‘authenticity’ arethemselves artifacts of strategic political processes, that they and theinstitutions they purport to justify are in fact morally arbitrary, and, therefore,that ‘authenticity’ cannot afford a basis for justifying policies aimed atprotecting culture in Fiji or elsewhere. I suggest in conclusion that byinvoking authenticity in this regard Carens courts a brand of relativism that isespecially pernicious in that it erodes the terrain of democratic representationand deliberation. This is ironic to the extent that Carens seeks to defenddemocracy as well as difference. On this basis I recommend that, for purposesof justifying social, political or economic arrangements, we abandon thelanguage of authenticity altogether.

keywords liberalism, authenticity, culture, strategy, justification

Introduction

Cultural difference (the product of those ubiquitous and unavoidable attachmentsthat humans construct through symbolic practices such as ritual, tradition, and

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James Johnson teaches social and political theory at the Department of Political Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA [email: [email protected]] 213

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myth) is a social fact of increasing political and legal importance. Indeed, oneplausibly can interpret contemporary legal and political practice as expressingincreasing commitment to protecting or promoting cultural difference. JosephRaz, for instance, succinctly traces the broad contours of law regarding culturalminorities from classic stances of toleration, through the assertion of non-discrimination rights, to the active affirmation of multiculturalism.1 Toleration,on his account, allows minorities to practice their culture so long as it does notaffect the majority. It thus allows the majority to restrict the access of culturalminorities to public media and public spaces. Non-discrimination rights disallowsuch restrictions, and hold, instead, that members of minority cultures cannot beexcluded from schools, neighborhoods, employment, and so on simply on thebasis of cultural membership. Practices of multiculturalism demand equal respectfor all viable minority cultures and, in that sense, can require distribution of political and economic resources in such a way as to sustain and insure the futureof minority cultural communities.2

From a theoretical perspective this evolving pattern of legal and political prac-tice requires justification. This task has preoccupied legal and political theoristsof various persuasions in recent years. The problem, of course, is that many cul-tural practices and attachments seem not to warrant respect and protection at all.3

Any effort to dispel such skepticism and establish a general presumption that we should respect culture, in the sense that we accord it standing in legal andpolitical deliberations, presupposes that we can persuasively answer at least two questions. First, in what does the ‘value of cultural membership’ consist?4

Second, given that any culture is dynamic, contested, and, therefore, highly con-tingent, how do we establish just what version or interpretation of a given culturewe aim to protect or to promote when we endorse multicultural policies? I amconcerned, in this paper, primarily with one way that liberal theorists answer thissecond question. Specifically, I examine the view that we can identify thoseattachments or practices that are candidates for one or another form of legal pro-tection by determining whether they are ‘authentic’, in the sense that members ofsome relevant group accept or embrace them as an integral component of theirculture. This view is forcefully articulated by Joseph Carens, first, in an extend-ed law review article entitled ‘Democracy and Respect for Difference’ (hence-forth, referred to as ‘DRD’, followed by a page citation) and, more recently, inhis book Culture, Citizenship, and Community.5

The remainder of the paper consists in four sections. In the next section, Isketch in some detail Carens’s position. In the process, I show that despite con-ventional misconceptions his position, or something very like it, is central to liberal arguments that we should respect culture. I then recapitulate very brieflythe empirical case (the complicated history of cultural politics on the islands ofFiji) that Carens takes as a vehicle for his argument. In section four, I challengethe implications that Carens draws from the Fijian case. In particular, I criticizehis claims that ‘authenticity’ affords a basis for justifying policies aimed at

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protecting indigenous Fijian culture. I suggest in the conclusion that by invokingauthenticity in this regard Carens courts a brand of relativism that is especiallypernicious in that it erodes the terrain of democratic representation and delibera-tion. This is ironic to the extent that Carens explicitly seeks to defend democracyas well as cultural difference.

My view, lest I be misunderstood, is that in any particular instance prevailinginstitutions and practices are the contingent product of strategic political process-es, that claims regarding the authenticity of prevailing or proposed practices andinstitutions, therefore, are necessarily contestable and very likely contested, andthat, absent of some further argument, prevailing institutions and practices aswell as assessments of their ‘authenticity’ are morally arbitrary. Thus, like thearrangements they purport to justify, claims of authenticity themselves stand inneed of justification. For these reasons and because the language of authenticityworks in quite pernicious ways to subvert processes of democratic deliberation,we would do well when seeking to justify social and political arrangements todispense altogether with claims to authenticity.

The nature and claims of authenticity

My aim in this essay is relatively modest. I consider just one criterion that liberaltheorists employ to identify which of several possible instantiations of a givenculture or practice is a legitimate candidate for political and legal protection. Iexplore and challenge the view that what ‘makes something a legitimate part ofa people’s culture, regardless of its origins is the fact that they have internalizedit, made it their own, integrated it with other aspects of their culture’ (DRD: 605,emphasis added). On this view, cultural practices are proper candidates for legaland political recognition and protection just so long as they are ‘authentic’. And,they are authentic just so long as the members of some relevant populationembrace them.6 Thus, by implication, ‘external observers should not pass judge-ment on the authenticity, and hence moral legitimacy, of some cultural commit-ment on the basis of its origins’ (DRD: 605, 614).

This, obviously, is not the only way one might approach the second of thequestions that liberal theorists confront. Others, instead, start from the starkrecognition that while there is some presumption that they are valuable, ‘somecultures, or aspects of some cultures, are unacceptable’.7 This apparently morerealistic stance allows liberals to advance nuanced policy prescriptions. On theone hand, they endorse multicultural policies that consist of various legallyenforced ‘external protections’ that help insulate culturally defined groups fromthe homogenizing pressures exerted by the larger society within which they exist.On the other hand, they nevertheless concede that states may under certain con-ditions legitimately step in to protect individuals from objectionable ‘internalrestrictions’ that groups to which they belong impose on them.8

As compared to such liberals, Carens adopts a seemingly quite concessive

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position. In the name of authenticity, he grants extremely wide latitude to cultur-ally defined groups in their dealings both with their own members and with out-siders. This might seem to render his position considerably less plausible thancompeting views. However, matters here are not nearly so simple as they appear.For four overlapping reasons Carens poses a much more significant challenge tocompeting liberal views than might be supposed.

First, competing liberal arguments themselves are problematic for many reasons, some of which Carens nicely articulates.9 I will not rehearse those diffi-culties at length here. For present purposes, it is important only to note thatCarens largely agrees with liberals such as Kymlicka and Raz on matters of sub-stance and is seeking a more persuasive defense of the claim that we rightlyshould accord weight to the particularistic cultural attachments of individuals andgroups in our political deliberations.

In this respect, Carens defends a quite complex position. At the most generallevel, he differentiates between policies or institutions that are ‘morally required’and those that are ‘morally permissible’ (DRD: 598–9). Many measures that wemight adopt for the purpose of protecting or preserving cultural practices or tradi-tions fall into this latter, less restrictive category. They represent ‘one possible setof steps it [is] legitimate to take even though other, quite different ones might not also have been wrong’ (DRD: 599). In any given circumstance, then, suchmeasures represent a contingent response to some pressing political problem.

Yet, like most liberal theorists, Carens recognizes that not just any culturalpractice warrants moral recognition, let alone legal or political protection. Evenunder press of circumstance any measure aimed at cultural preservation or pro-tection is constrained, according to Carens, by ‘the requirements of justice’(DRD: 589). He includes here, for instance, certain basic freedoms that constitute‘the minimal moral standards that any regime should be expected to meet’ (DRD:626). In this regard, his position converges both with liberals such as Kymlickaand Raz and with communitarians such as Charles Taylor all of whom acknow-ledge some trade-off (however poorly specified) between claims made in termsof justice and rights and those made in terms of particularistic cultural attach-ments. My aim is to establish that despite this avowed position the language ofauthenticity tacitly pushes Carens to privilege particularistic cultural claims inways that are unsustainable.

At a slightly less general level, Carens insists correctly that we cannot avoidmaking judgments regarding cultural practices and institutions (DRD: 589–90,624–5). In a complex, plural, interconnected world such judgments regularly and ineluctably press themselves upon us. He is concerned that in making suchjudgments we not ‘be led astray by misunderstandings or misinterpretations ofpractices and institutions not our own’ (DRD: 590). This, in part, is why Carensplaces such weight on claims to cultural authenticity.10 It, nonetheless, is impor-tant to note that he repeatedly acknowledges that we cannot simply accept suchclaims at ‘face value’ (DRD: 590, 604). Here too his position converges with a


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prominent variant of liberal theory that, while ‘it respects a variety of cultures’,nevertheless ‘refuses to take them at their own estimation’.11 The position Carenswishes to defend thus turns out, in relative terms, not to be nearly so forgiving asit might initially appear.

Second, in one or another form, liberals such as Tamir, Kymlicka and Razexplicitly discount authenticity as a criterion for identifying those cultures orpractices that might be candidates for official recognition and legal protection.Unfortunately, the arguments that such theorists advance not only fail to engagethe position that Carens defends, they sometimes actually amount, in whole or inpart, to the same view.

Tamir offers an example of the latter sort. She dismisses views on which ‘theright to culture is interpreted as the right to preserve the culture in its “authentic”form’.12 She suggests (rightly, I think) that such interpretations often operate todisguise social, political, and economic asymmetries among members of the cul-ture and to direct attention away from the dynamic, contested character of anyculture.13 Yet, Tamir ultimately embraces a view that very much resembles theone Carens defends. She claims that we should value cultures, however dynamicor contested they may be and however recent their provenance, ‘because theyallow individuals to participate in a cultural process they regard as their own’.14

Raz and Kymlicka make common cause with Tamir in her characterization ofculture. Both insist on the dynamic, changing, indeed contested, character ofevery culture. And, both recognize that cultural arrangements often work to thedisadvantage of some members. Thus, Raz insists that what he calls ‘liberalmulticulturalism’ must be ‘non-utopian’ in just the sense that it recognizes thatall cultures are contingent, contested, and changing.15 Likewise, Kymlicka rejectsthe notion that liberals must view any external pressure or internal conflict ‘as athreat to [the] “purity” or “integrity” of a culture’. Indeed, he insists that liberalsconsider the changes that such pressures and conflicts create as a sign of healthand vitality.16

A quick reading of Carens might lead one to suspect that his view stands atsome distance from liberals such as Tamir, Raz, and Kymlicka. Yet, in fact, hedisagrees with almost nothing either in their characterization of culture as chang-ing and contested or in the implications they draw from it (DRD: 551).17 Hisproject is simply to explore whether and how we might justify efforts to preserveor protect cultures given that they are changing and contested. And, the concep-tion of authenticity upon which he relies in no way denies that cultures are justso.

Third, Carens is, in important ways, more realistic than other political theo-rists, whether liberal, communitarian, or otherwise, who seek to defend culturalparticularity. Such theorists rightly insist that human beings necessarily ‘makeand inhabit meaningful worlds’.18 But, captivated by the diversity and eleganceof worlds not their own, those same theorists typically forget that neither we norothers make meaning in a naive or disinterested way. So, while they acknow-


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ledge the inevitability of cultural conflict and change, they typically fail to appre-ciate the implications of such conflict and change for the questions I mentionedat the outset.19 This allows theorists seeking to defend the value of cultural membership per se to assert that ‘we do justice to actual men and women byrespecting their particular creations’.20

In the face of such claims, Amelie Rorty observes that recent briefs for multi-culturalism ‘often appeal to the poetics of idealized cultural identity without fullyacknowledging the ways that characterizing the “identity” of a culture is itself apolitically and ideologically charged issue’. She goes on to note that the ‘everpresent question[s] “From whose perspective?” and “In whose interests?” per-meate the politics of historically based cultural characterization’.21 And, she alsorightly suggests that both liberal and communitarian defenses of the moral statusof cultural difference remain unpersuasive to the extent that they neglect theinevitable politics of culture.

It is just here that Carens, because he grounds his argument in an extended,detailed, and provocative analysis of the complex cultural politics on the islandsof Fiji, distances himself from other legal and political theorists (DRD: 554–74).He is suitably aware of the dangers of extrapolating too quickly from the Fijiancase.22 Yet, the attention he devotes to the politics of culture is one importantrespect in which his argument carries a sort of plausibility that competingaccounts, whether liberal or communitarian, often lack.

Lastly, by focusing on authenticity Carens highlights the way that liberaldefenses of the value of cultural membership tacitly, but unavoidably, presup-pose that it is possible to individuate legitimate candidates for official recogni-tion and legal protection. Liberals deny that cultures are intrinsically valuable.23

They arguably must do so if they hope to strike a balance between endorsing policies that afford ‘external protections’ to minority cultures and conceding that government can legitimately intervene to protect individual members fromobjectionable ‘internal restrictions’ that such cultures might impose on them.Liberals, instead, defend the normative value of cultural attachments in broadlyconsequentialist terms by arguing that cultures deserve protection or preservationsolely because they contribute in an important way to the well-being of some relevant individual or group.24 Carens too embraces a version of such conse-quentialist reasoning. His ‘moral justification of cultural preservation’ rests onthe claim that policies aimed at protecting threatened cultural communitiesenhance the well-being of relevant individuals and groups by insulating themfrom especially dire negative consequences that often follow from larger social,political, and economic transformations (DRD: 574–7, 594–7).25

This consequentialist reasoning suffers from an obvious difficulty. It providesno account of why, given the unavoidably contested and thus contingent charac-ter of any culture, we are under any burden to protect or preserve any particularincarnation of any particular culture.26 Simply put, while human well-beingindisputably depends on the availability of cultural scaffolding, that in no way


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establishes that the well-being of any given individual or group depends either on the preservation of an encompassing, integrated culture or on access to anyparticular incarnation of their own particular cultural context.27 It is just here thatthe notion of authenticity as Carens deploys it might provide some much neededcritical purchase. If he can successfully argue that, despite the influence of exter-nal pressures and internal conflict, this particular practice, embedded in thisgiven context, warrants respect and protection because it is authentic, he can lendplausibility to the common liberal claim that individuals and groups are entitlednot just to some cultural context, but to the preservation of their own culture.28

Historical background

Carens reconstructs the history of cultural politics on Fiji in a way that highlightsthe central importance of institutions of political authority and of property owner-ship, in particular ownership of land.29 In the late nineteenth century, the Britishcolonial administration followed its familiar practice of indirect rule and imposedgovernmental structures on Fiji in which political power generally and authorityfor interpreting ‘local custom’ in particular were mediated through a council ofnative chiefs. In so doing, Carens concedes, the British altered indigenous politi-cal relations on the island in significant ways (DRD: 597, 610–11). The colonialadministration also implemented policies that defined as ‘traditional’ one amongseveral possible regimes of property rights (DRD: 556–7). This regime forbadethe sale of Fijian land to non-natives and incorporated as well a specific form ofcommon ownership, strict restrictions on labor mobility, and communal respon-sibility for taxes.30 Together, these colonial institutions, which ‘had significantcontinuities as well as discontinuities with what had preceded colonization’, sus-tained a remarkably resilient village culture among native Fijians that survived,despite various political, economic, and demographic pressures, through theearly 1960s (DRD: 556–60).

The political and cultural landscape on Fiji is complicated by the presence onthe islands of a large population of Indians, whose direct ancestors were trans-ported there from the subcontinent as indentured laborers over a roughly 40-yearperiod ending in 1916 (DRD: 560–63). By the early 1960s, the Fijian Indians hadin many cases inhabited the islands for several generations and constituted 51percent of the population as compared to the 46 percent consisting of indigenousFijians.31 The Fijian Indians originally were imported to work on agriculturalplantations in a practice that was not only condoned by the colonial administra-tion, but arguably was made necessary by the labor-market restrictions that theBritish imposed on indigenous Fijians (DRD: 555, 557, 561, 580). Upon theirrelease from servitude many Indians entered commerce, especially commercialagriculture. On average, and especially relative to indigenous Fijians, theyattained relatively high levels of economic success. This prosperity, nevertheless,


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was tempered by insecurity induced by legal prohibitions that prevented themfrom owning the land that they cultivated.

Indigenous Fijians and Fijian Indians differ across multiple dimensions,including race, religion, language, and occupation. There is little contact andconsiderable suspicion between the two groups (DRD: 563–4). Not surprisingly,post-colonial politics on the islands reflect these differences. The British grantedFiji independence in 1970. The constitution drafted at that time was intended toprotect the cultural attachments of indigenous Fijians and so incorporated racialrepresentation, maintained the political power of the native Fijian chiefs, andretained the ‘traditional’ regime of property rights, including prohibitions on thesale of land to non-natives. Not surprisingly these features of the constitutionmarginalized the Indian population politically and contributed to their continuedeconomic insecurity (DRD: 568–9). Despite constitutional protections and someinitial success, however, the political party representing native Fijians encoun-tered shifting electoral fortunes and, in 1987, lost national elections to a coalitionof parties that predominantly represented non-natives and that advocated reformof the legal restrictions on the ability of non-natives to own land. The militaryreacted to this electoral outcome by staging a bloodless coup aimed at restoringpolitical dominance to indigenous Fijians (DRD: 569–74).32

Authenticity and political justification

Carens responds to this narrative in a subtle way. He is critical of the coup andforthrightly so. He also recognizes and criticizes the political marginalization andeconomic insecurity of Fijian Indians that the coup aimed to sustain (DRD:577–89). Yet, he nevertheless defends the authenticity, and hence legitimacy, ofindigenous Fijian cultural practices and in particular their ‘traditional’ patterns of chiefly authority and attachments to the land. This is the judgment I wish tocontest. I suggest, by drawing on the narrative of cultural politics on Fiji thatCarens himself presents, that because any ‘traditional’ social or political arrange-ment is a political construct, and so unavoidably an artifact of strategic inter-action, claims to ‘authenticity’ are arbitrary from a normative perspective.33

They, therefore, do not afford an adequate normative anchor for the consequen-tialist case for cultural protection that Carens advances.

Carens clearly foresees this line of criticism. He complains about theorists who‘object to any effort at cultural preservation on the grounds that every culture isindeterminate and contested, and that the idea of preserving a culture inevitablyprivileges one particular understanding of the culture over others and rigidifiesthe culture in an artificial way’ (DRD: 609). He finds this extreme positionunpersuasive and he is right to do so. But he is not thereby off the hook. Carensis right that ‘every culture is indeterminate and contested’. This, however, neednot lead one to ‘object to any effort at cultural preservation’. It can, more


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modestly, suggest three things. First, that any such effort stands in need of justi-fication. Second, that the mere existence among and acceptance by some part ofa population of any given cultural arrangement (what Carens would call its‘authenticity’) is a far from sufficient basis for such justification. And, third, thatthe language of authenticity may present an active hindrance to efforts at justifi-cation. I defend this view by contesting the implications that Carens draws fromhis narrative of cultural politics on Fiji.

As already noted, Carens offers in Culture, Citizenship, and Community, abroadly consequentialist case for cultural preservation. He grounds that case onthe claim that from some range of cultural practices (traditions, myths, rituals, andso on) not only can we identify those that are legitimate candidates for culturalprotection or preservation by virtue of their ‘authenticity’, but that, irrespective oftheir origins, those practices deemed authentic are thereby exempt, or very nearlyso, from criticism. Thus, the fact that native Fijian traditions were, by his ownaccount, constructed by a subset of the native Fijian elite in concert with theBritish colonial administration should have no bearing on our assessment of theirauthenticity and, hence, whether they can be justified. Colonial political-econom-ic arrangements on Fiji were, Carens contends, warranted historically becausethey successfully perpetuated ‘traditional’ Fijian practices. They thereby insu-lated indigenous Fijians from the ‘disastrous consequences’ that befall otherindigenous peoples who, when their traditional practices and identities are sub-verted by economic, political, and demographic change, are rendered especiallyvulnerable to disease, social anomie, economic exploitation, and political oppres-sion (DRD: 574–7, 603). Carens insists that despite their origins and dramaticallychanged circumstances, ‘traditional’ Fijian political-economic arrangementsremain justified for the same reason (DRD: 603). In this sense, the colonial insti-tutions that the British established on Fiji are an especially successful example ofthe sort of external protection that liberals would extend to threatened minority orindigenous cultures.34 Yet, clearly, we cannot justify just any set of institutionalarrangements in this way and Carens takes great pains to argue that residual paternalism and persistent power asymmetries do not conspire to subvert theauthenticity and, thereby, the moral standing of ‘traditional’ Fijian political-economic institutions.

Here, we confront a particular instance of a more general problem. What is atstake is the normative status of institutional arrangements that structure political-economic relations, that have pronounced distributional consequences, and that,in large measure, result from strategic interactions marked by extreme resourceasymmetries.35 Such institutions represent, in the most general and abstractterms, equilibrium outcomes generated as a by-product of strategic conflict overthe distribution of social, political, and economic resources.36 On this account,relatively disadvantaged parties do not comply with institutions (whether formalor informal) because they consent to them, or because they are tricked or forcedinto doing so. Rather, the disadvantaged comply because, once advantaged


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parties credibly commit to a particular course of action, they can do no better thanto comply.37 From this perspective, any effort to establish that a given institutionis legitimate because it is ‘authentic’ seems especially strained. Moreover, whenseen from this perspective, ‘traditional’ Fijian political-economic institutions areno different than institutions elsewhere.

Carens anticipates something like this line of argument and seeks to deflect itin at least four ways (DRD: 609ff). First, he argues that since all cultures are sub-ject to exogenous influences, it is unfair to single out traditional Fijian political-economic arrangements for criticism on that score. Second, he seeks to establishthat the benefits of traditional Fijian arrangements are morally attractive evengiven the admitted costs. Third, he challenges critics of ‘traditional’ institutionalarrangements on the islands to base their objections on some historically viablealternative. Lastly, he argues that indigenous Fijians and Fijian Indians have verydifferent attachments to the land and that this difference is morally consequen-tial. For purposes of explication, I refer to these as the ‘fair criticism’ thesis, the‘acceptable costs’ thesis, the ‘viable alternatives’ thesis, and the ‘symbolicattachment’ thesis respectively. I will take up each in turn.

First, consider the ‘fair criticism’ thesis. Carens differentiates between ‘exo-genous influences’ on Fijian culture and ‘the issue of the manipulation of the culture for the sake of internal domination’. He argues that since ‘all cultures aresubject to exogenous influences’ (in much the way that Fiji was subject to Britishcolonialism) such influence on the origins of cultural practices should not swayour assessment of their legitimacy (DRD: 605).38

Unfortunately, it is not very easy to sustain this distinction between exogenousand endogenous factors. The British, for example, did not invade and conquerFiji. A subset of the chiefly elite relinquished power to the British in large measure as part of ‘a strategy for dealing with internal political conflicts’ (DRD:555). Not surprisingly, the British then imposed structures of political authorityand property rights that accorded with what those chiefs defined as traditionalpractice. In the process, the colonial administration subverted other possiblepolitical-economic arrangements that might have just as well been deemed ‘traditional’ (DRD: 555–6, 597, 599–601, 604). Are we to believe that, havingstruck a bargain with the British in order to constrain their domestic rivals, theFijian chiefs might then have defined traditional cultural practices in ways thatworked to their own distributional disadvantage relative to domestic competi-tors? This more than strains credulity.39 Yet, Carens casts his discussion of Fijiin such a way as to downplay just such distributional conflicts within the indige-nous population and to focus instead upon the relations between native Fijiansand the British or Fijian Indians. This, as we shall see, generates further diffi-culties.40

Second, consider the ‘acceptable costs’ thesis. Carens insists that the benefitsthat colonial institutions brought to indigenous Fijians outweigh the admittedcosts of the historical process through which they were imposed. I already have


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sketched his general stance on this matter. Here, I offer two objections to argu-ments that he advances in support of this view.

First, any plausible account of the consequences of ‘traditional’ political-economic arrangements on Fiji must include the very presence of the large Indianpopulation on the islands. Carens insists that it was ‘morally permissible’ for theindigenous Fijians to establish institutional arrangements that prohibited theirindenturing themselves (DRD: 598–9). He is quite right to characterize thosearrangements as ‘defensive’ and to point out that they initially were not intendedto assert native domination over Fijian Indians (DRD: 596–7, 603). That said, hisargument for that view must fully recognize that one very significant, if un-intended, consequence of the ‘traditional’ political-economic arrangements wasto prompt the British to import indentured labor from elsewhere in the firstplace.41 The costs to those who would as a result become Fijian Indians includedboth extreme material hardship and, tellingly, the decimation of their culturalpractices and traditions (DRD: 562). Does he hope to claim that the Fijian Indiansentered their indenture contracts voluntarily? In that sense, how was their circumstance different from that confronting indigenous Fijians? Is indenturedlabor ‘morally permissible’ in some cases and not others? Lastly, how might weassess the demise of cultural practices and traditions among those who, as a resultof indentured servitude, became Fijian Indians? Carens does not explore suchissues.

Second, Carens hopes to establish that a majority of native Fijians seem will-ing to bear whatever costs their traditional arrangements generate.42 He suggeststhat indigenous Fijians by and large accept chiefly authority and the inalienabilityof land as ‘authentic’ traditions. And, he claims that this acceptance itself lendsthose traditions presumptive legitimacy in the face of external criticism (DRD:613). Here, however, Carens is insufficiently critical.

There is little doubt that most indigenous Fijians comply with extant political-economic institutions. Yet mere compliance is hardly a reliable proxy for con-sent.43 Institutions, as noted above, are equilibria and, as such, are self-enforcing.Once established, they can and typically do persist even where ongoing ‘raw co-ercion’ and massive ‘deception’ of the sort for which Carens unsurprisingly findslittle evidence among native Fijians are largely absent (DRD: 614–5). Carens doesacknowledge episodic resistance to the chiefly hierarchy. Yet, he sees the sporadic, largely unsuccessful nature of that resistance, and in particular the frag-mented and unsuccessful nature of electoral support for reform (DRD: 556, 615,630), as yet another indicator of popular consent to ‘traditional’ institutionsamong indigenous Fijians. In so doing, he underestimates the strategic problemsthat attend any effort to mobilize such opposition. This oversight is especiallytelling in light of the reasons why, according to Carens, native Fijians needed theirtraditional institutions in the first place. He portrays the imposition of ‘traditional’prohibitions on the sale of land to non-natives as a pre-commitment device meantto overcome a collective action problem among indigenous Fijians. Absent such


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prohibitions each native Fijian landowner, on Carens’s account, would have anincentive to sell land and, thereby, undermine the material bases of their ‘tradi-tional’ culture (DRD: 607). This analysis is persuasive. Native Fijians faced justsuch a collective action problem. In particular, what was at issue was not simplythe alienability of property rights, but the appearance of new actors (for example,colonial entrepreneurs) for whom the pay-offs to property ownership differed considerably from those of the indigenous population.44 But, Carens notwith-standing, this analysis affords no special reason to embrace the particular solutionthat the British colonial administration, in collaboration with a segment of theFijian elite, imposed on the islands.

This is so for at least two related reasons. First, any ongoing collective actionproblem is susceptible to a range of cooperative solutions.45 In that sense, theactual arrangements on Fiji are not especially privileged. They are simply onemorally arbitrary outcome of strategic interactions and so need to be justified.The task of moral justification is especially difficult and pressing because the resolution to a collective action problem typically has distributional conse-quences and, in such cases, actors deploy pre-commitment strategies as much toconstrain others as to constrain themselves.46 Second, Carens cannot have it bothways. He analyzes the forcible imposition of ‘traditional’ practices as at least inpart an effort to dampen collective action problems. Having done so, however, heclearly also must allow that other actors in his narrative (say, native Fijians whomight be dissatisfied with ‘traditional’ political and economic arrangements evenas they comply with those arrangements) face analogous strategic problems inother domains, such as mounting political opposition to the chiefly elites.47 In theend, then, the compliance of native Fijians with ‘traditional’ political-economicinstitutions provides no terribly persuasive reason to treat them as justified.

Turn now to the ‘viable alternatives’ thesis. Carens insists that we must dealwith ‘plausible historical possibilities’ (DRD: 601). He argues that it is dis-ingenuous to contrast the actual institutional arrangements that indigenousFijians established and sustained under colonial rule with ‘some hypotheticallybenign course in which the Fijians harmoniously developed racially integratedeconomic and political institutions, effectively transforming their cultural tradi-tions in ways that enabled them to compete successfully as individuals with othergroups’ (DRD: 601–2). Here, Carens is clearly correct only to the extent that weaccept the options that his narrowly specified counterfactual allows — either weendorse the extant political-economic arrangements on Fiji or we project anunabashedly utopian alternative. Yet this counterfactual is quite poorly specified.Why, for instance, were extreme options (either total alienability of land, un-fettered labor mobility, and so on, or the actual package of prohibitions that theBritish actually enacted) the only ones available to the native Fijians?48 Carenshimself recognizes that property commonly is understood as a bundle of rightsand that the particular features of actual bundles are quite various. The Britishmight well have implemented some other bundle.49 The conditions that precluded


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their doing so were, in all likelihood, purely strategic. They were concerned to solidify an alliance with a subset of the native Fijian elite who, in turn, wereconcerned to defend their own prerogatives relative to both the British anddomestic political rivals.

Suppose that Carens could show that the sorts of historical reconstruction Isketch are implausible? Even were we to set them to one side, his position is notobviously strengthened. For the relevant counterfactual may not involve compet-ing institutional traditions at all. It, instead, arguably consists in a comparisonbetween the extant institutional arrangements that are an artifact of colonial ruleand the surely non-utopian reforms that contemporary Fijian Indians and nativeFijians might have negotiated democratically had the latter not (now, repeatedly)resorted to force to pre-empt that possibility. As Carens makes plain, the rulingcoalition overthrown by the 1987 coup revolved around the Labour Party (DRD:572–4).50 And, he suggests that Labour was concerned with ‘building a multi-racial, democratic, and egalitarian society in Fiji’ (DRD: 629).51 Despite his condemnation of the coup, Carens never treats such goals and the sorts of demo-cratic politics, however difficult and conflictual, that might have generated themas a plausible historical possibility. I return in the conclusion to the reasons hemight have difficulty doing so.

Lastly, consider the ‘symbolic attachment’ thesis. Carens suggests that theFijian Indians and the indigenous Fijians have very different relations to the landand that these differences sanction treating traditional arrangements as authentic.For Fijian Indians, attachment to the land, on his account, rests more or less purely on ‘an economic interest rather than a cultural one’ (DRD: 578, 605). Bycontrast, native Fijians, according to Carens, have a ‘powerful attachment to theland’ that is ‘symbolic and cultural’, rather than instrumental, and in that sense,is ‘constitutive of native Fijian identity’ (DRD: 578, 595, 604).52 Yet this dis-tinction surely cannot bear the weight Carens places upon it. His entire objectiveis to establish that cultural attachments have normative standing despite the factthat such attachments are always shifting and contested. Thus, the mere claimthat something is ‘symbolic’ hardly does more than restate a crucial premise.That said, Carens faces further difficulties. For it is quite difficult, perhaps ultimately impossible, to sustain the dichotomy between ‘symbolic’ and ‘instru-mental’ concerns.

In the first place, on the account that Carens provides, Fijian Indians resent notonly the material insecurity that ‘traditional’ political-economic arrangementsimpose on them, but also the inability or unwillingness of indigenous Fijians torecognize that Fijian Indians too have contributed in significant ways to eco-nomic and political development on the islands. Land tenancy and property own-ership thus become a symbolic issue for Fijian Indians as well.53

Second, despite his admission that cultural practices are thoroughly and un-avoidably contested, Carens here adopts a remarkably naive view of ‘symbolic’relations. Identities, just in so far as they trade upon the force of symbolic


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practices like tradition, are themselves strategic artifacts. Indeed, Carens himselfindicates that the indigenous Fijians traded upon recently established definitionsof cultural tradition as they crafted their social and political identity for strategicpurposes (DRD: 566). It precisely is the propensity of legal and political theoriststo neglect such strategic processes that sustains their preoccupation with the‘poetics’, rather than the ‘politics’, of culture. I will not pursue this point here.54

I instead wish to point out that Carens here arrives at the center of liberal argu-ments for cultural protections.

Carens denies that economic interests somehow are ‘less vital’ than culturalinterests (DRD: 605). Yet, like other theorists concerned to make the case that wemust respect and protect culture, he systematically treats cultural attachments assomehow more abiding, deeper, and hence as less susceptible to compromise andaccommodation than economic interests. This, I suspect, is why he devotes somuch time trying to establish the ‘authenticity’ of native Fijian cultural traditions.I have sought to show that his effort is unpersuasive just to the extent that he neglects the strategic scaffolding of political and economic interests aroundwhich a subset of native Fijians constructed what now are construed as ‘tradi-tional’ practices.

Conclusion

I hope the nature of my argument is clear. Two things, in particular, are impor-tant. First, I do not mean to suggest that individuals or groups might not havewhat Carens calls a ‘vital interest’ in preserving their culture (DRD: 595–6,604–5). They might. But such an interest and any legal or political measuresdesigned to protect it themselves stand in need of justification. And, claims of‘authenticity’ are, for reasons I have given, an especially inauspicious basis onwhich to construct such a justification. Second, it follows that I do not mean tosuggest that, as compared to extant Fijian ‘traditions’, some other suppressedarrangements might be somehow more authentic and hence more legitimate.55

Rather, I recommend that, for purposes of justifying social, political or econom-ic arrangements, we abandon the language of authenticity altogether.

Carens might object that I am obliged to offer an alternative basis for justifi-cation. Here, I can do no more than sketch such a view in broad outline. The legitimacy of institutions and practices, traditional or otherwise, depends onwhether they and, by extension, the political, economic, or cultural interests thatthey embody can be justified with reasons.56 In this sense, Walzer, in the passageI quoted earlier, reverses the bases of respect. We do not, as he suggests, treatothers as equals by respecting the cultural practices that they create and sustain.Instead, we respect cultural practices, in any meaningful sense of that phrase, bytreating as equals the individuals and groups who, when challenged, defend thosepractices with reasons that others might plausibly accept. The case of Fiji asCarens recounts it inadvertently underscores this problem of justification. It


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demonstrates that, on close inspection, the origins of ‘traditional’ practices arerelevant to our normative judgments precisely in so far as they highlight sorts ofconsequences that make claims advanced regarding the value of cultural attach-ments sometimes more, but usually less, persuasive.

How do these broad views relate to the Fijian case as Carens depicts it? First,this sketch is not, as some might suspect, indefensibly ethnocentric when appliedto Fiji. As Carens indicates, native Fijians are, under most circumstances, com-mitted to democratic decision-making and they do not invoke unfamiliar, cultur-ally particular conceptions of justice (DRD: 613, 593–4). This is what makestheir (now recurrent) willingness to resort to force in defense of their ‘traditional’political-economic prerogatives and their tendency to rely upon ad hominemattacks, rather than ‘reasoned defense’, when responding to critics of their repeat-ed coups especially distressing (DRD: 589–90, 592).

Second, the approach I sketch is not based on ‘a smug and superficial assump-tion about the moral superiority of our own time and place, an assumption thatenables us to avoid self-examination and self-criticism’ (DRD: 624). It is indis-putable that political theorists should avoid using ‘powerful critical ideals’ suchas reasoned defense of social and political arrangements as criteria by which toassess ‘an actual political system such as Fiji’s . . . unless we are prepared tojudge other actual systems by the same standard’ (DRD: 614). I would invoke the same standard that I sketch above to assess institutional arrangements andcultural practices more generally.57 This, I think, has interesting implications.

Political actors, singly or in groups, often include among their partial interests,some set of cultural attachments. Yet, we do not respect others by acquiescing tojust any interest that they advance. Interests provide one sort of reason in moraland political argument. They are, like reasons generally, contestable and, indeed,rebuttable. From this perspective, challenging cultural practices that seem objec-tionable may well signal our respect for those ‘others’ who subscribe to them. Itsignals that we, in fact, endeavor to treat them as equals. Here, challenge is not equivalent to condemnation. It instead encourages a response, an effort to justify, and so implies that those whom we challenge might, in fact, convince usthat our concerns are, partly or wholly, misplaced.58 That said, the view I sketchhere suggests that we are under no obligation to directly respect either whole cultures or particular practices at all. We instead respect the social and politicalactors who endorse cultural practices. That respect is warranted just to the extentthat, when challenged by internal dissenters, external critics, or both, those actorsseek in good faith to justify the practices in question.59 In the end, then, we should not respect particular cultural attachments or practices per se. Rather, weshould respect those cultural attachments and practices that, because they canwithstand critical, public scrutiny, reflect the considered judgments of social andpolitical agents. And, we should respect the processes of democratic challengeand reasoned argument that sustain those judgments.60

Here, finally, we return to the troubling relation between cultural difference


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and democracy. On this point, despite his intentions, the position Carens defendsverges on an undemocratic relativism. He suggests that when they encounterseemingly objectionable events, practices, or institutions, external observersmust defer to local appraisals of authenticity. But a claim to authenticity is, in thecontext of political argument, a conversation stopper. It is a claim of privilegethat derails processes of representation and deliberation by placing particular topics beyond the realm of democratic assessment and justification.

Anne Phillips makes this point in a discussion of ‘identity politics’ generallyand of contemporary feminist politics in particular. ‘The search for authenticity’,she observes, ‘makes it difficult for anyone to represent an experience not identical to her own and, taken to this extreme, renders dialogue virtually impossible’.61 The reason for this becomes clear when we contrast claims ofauthenticity to other exclusionary strategies that one might defend on the groundsthat they remove contentious issues from the political agenda and so enable democratic arrangements to function more effectively.62 For such strategiesthemselves require justification, while assertions of authenticity (like their etymological cousin, claims to authority) aim to dispense with justification.63 Anassertion of authenticity aims to elicit compliance or acquiescence based solelyon the agent’s willingness to invoke an experience or identity that is in principleparticularistic and so inaccessible to others. It, thus, is very difficult to see howappeals to ‘authenticity’ can do anything but hinder efforts to navigate the dividebetween cultural difference and democracy.

notes

The impetus for this essay was a conversation several years ago with Joseph Carens at ameeting of the Toronto Chapter of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought. Ithank him and others for provoking me on that occasion. I prepared this revised versionfor presentation to the Max Planck Project Group on Common Goods — Law, Politics,and Economics, Bonn, Germany. I subsequently have presented it to the Department ofGovernment at Dartmouth College and the Department of Politics, NYU. I thank theaudiences at all three institutions for their hospitality and critical engagement. Anyremaining errors or infelicities are my own.

1. Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994),pp. 172–3. See also Joseph Raz, ‘Multiculturalism’, Ratio Juris 11 (1998): pp. 193–205.

2. Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Multiculturalism, edited by AmyGutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994): pp. 51–61 sketches thehistorical transitions and conflicts between these sorts of policies in Canada and theUSA.

3. Brian Barry, Susan Okin, and I each press this point in different ways. Barry arguesthat the preoccupation with cultural difference is shortsighted in so far as it divertsattention from pressing issues concerning the distribution of material goods. SeeBrian Barry, ‘The Limits of Cultural Politics’, Review of International Studies 24(1998): pp. 307–19. Okin suggests how multiculturalism frequently threatens the


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equality of women. See Susan Okin, ‘Feminism and Multiculturalism: SomeTensions’, Ethics 108 (1998): pp. 661–84. Elsewhere I argue, in ways that anticipatethe present paper, that liberal and communitarian philosophers who presume that weshould respect culture, never adequately defend that presumption and that theirarguments are, for that reason, unpersuasive. See James Johnson, ‘Why RespectCulture?’ American Journal of Political Science 44 (2000): pp. 405–18.

4. The quoted phrase is from Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1995).

5. Joseph Carens, ‘Democracy and Respect for Difference’, University of MichiganJournal of Law Reform 25 (1992): pp. 547–631. In what follows, as noted, I refer tothis essay parenthetically as DRD followed by page numbers. Carens incorporates asomewhat abridged version of the original essay as the final chapter in his recentbook. See Joseph Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community, (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000). Although he has revised and condensed the earlier paperfor the book, his argument remains essentially unchanged. For present purposes, Irefer primarily to the earlier paper and rely on the subsequent version that Carensincludes in the book only in so far as he departs from the original.

6. Thus, Carens (DRD: 613) suggests that ‘it would seem reasonable to let the peoplewhose culture and history are in question to be the judges of whether contemporaryinstitutions and practices should be regarded as authentically traditional. This is notthe same as saying that whatever institutions and practices they accept are authentic.Rather, it is to say that whatever institutions and practices they accept as traditionalare authentic’.

7. Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, p. 184.8. See Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. 35ff and Raz, Ethics in the Public

Domain, pp. 184–7, 190. Communitarians such as Taylor also wrestle with thistension. His ‘politics of cultural recognition’, while committed to traditional rights,is wedded neither to uncompromising insistence on ‘uniform application of the rulesdefining these rights without exception’ nor to individualist skepticism regarding‘collective goals’. He claims that this view allows for uncompromising applicationof such universalist rights as habeas corpus and while allowing us ‘to weigh theimportance of certain forms of uniform treatment against the importance of culturalsurvival, and opt sometimes in favor of the latter’. See Taylor, ‘The Politics ofRecognition’, pp. 60–1. To the best of my knowledge, Taylor never systematicallydiscusses how we might make such difficult judgments. Compare Michael Walzer,Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983), pp. 313–5.

9. See Joseph Carens, ‘Liberalism and Culture’, Constellations 4 (1997): pp. 35–47.Carens also incorporates this essay as chapter three of his recent book. He therefocuses on the positions that Kymlicka defends. His criticism focuses on the rolethat Kymlicka accords to the concept of a ‘societal culture’. Kymlicka,Multicultural Citizenship, pp. 10–18, 26–33, relies on that concept to differentiatebetween ‘multinational’ and ‘polyethnic’ patterns of cultural diversity and, fromthere, to recommend different sorts of policy response to the claims of groupswithin each category. Carens’s criticisms of Kymlicka are especially detailed andtelling. They apply to other liberals in so far as they rely on similar concepts tomotivate their substantive positions. Thus, Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, p. 129,differentiates ‘peoples and other groups that are serious candidates for the right to


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self-determination’ from those who are not, precisely in terms of the ‘pervasivecultures’ that mark the identity of members belonging to groups of the former sort.Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal, ‘Liberalism and the Right to Culture’, SocialResearch 61 (1994): pp. 497–8, simply identify groups characterized by‘encompassing’ cultures as the relevant bearers of a right to culture. And, for Tamir,a common culture grounds the right to national self-determination. See Yael Tamir,Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 67–77. Formy own criticisms of these views see Johnson, ‘Why Respect Culture?’

10. Here too Carens enters a caveat. He insists that his strictures regarding authenticityapply only to ‘external observers because claims about origins can sometimes play arole in internal debates within cultures about questions of authenticity’ (DRD:605n). I suspect that the distinction between internal dissenters and externalobservers is not easily sustainable. ‘External’ judgments about cultural practicesoften are prompted precisely by the complaints of dissidents.

11. Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, pp. 182–3.12. Tamir, Liberal Nationalism, p. 48.13. Ibid., pp. 48–9.14. Ibid., pp. 51–2.15. Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, p. 182.16. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. 101–4.17. See too Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community, p. 15.18. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, p. 314.19. See Johnson, ‘Why Respect Culture?’20. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, p. 314.21. Amelie Rorty, ‘The Hidden Politics of Cultural Identification’, Political Theory 22

(1994): pp. 152, 158. Similarly, Appiah has noted: ‘one reasonable ground forsuspicion of much contemporary multicultural talk is that it presupposesconceptions of collective identity that are remarkably unsubtle in theirunderstandings of the processes by which identities, both individual and collective,develop’. See K. Anthony Appiah, ‘Identity, Authenticity, Survival: MulticulturalSocieties and Social Reproduction’, in Multiculturalism, edited by Amy Gutmann(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994): p. 156. For extended arguments tothis effect, see Johnson, ‘Why Respect Culture?’ and James Johnson, ‘InventingConstitutional Traditions’, in Constitutional Culture and Democratic Rule, edited byJohn Ferejohn, Jack Rakove, and Jonathan Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2001): pp. 71–109.

22. He acknowledges that we ‘cannot simply affirm or oppose cultural preservation onthe basis of the Fijian story’. That said, he also rightly insists that close inspectionof particular cases helps to underscore the ‘moral complexity’ of the issue (DRD:549, 577). Here, Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community, more generallydefends a pragmatic, contextualist approach that is, I think, especially attractive.

23. Cultures thus lack ‘moral status of their own’ according to Will Kymlicka,Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 165. See also Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 83, and Raz, Ethics in thePublic Domain, pp. 176–8. By contrast, in ‘The Politics of Recognition’, Taylor, forexample, claims, without any convincing argument, that culture is intrinsicallyvaluable. See also Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard


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University Press, 1995), pp. 127–45. For discussion of this point, see Johnson,‘Why Respect Culture?’, pp. 406–8.

24. Thus, Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain, p. 178, insists that ‘Cultural . . . groupshave a life of their own. But their moral claim to respect and prosperity restsentirely on their vital importance to the prosperity of individual human beings’.Liberals commonly provide content to this claim in two ways. Some insist that the‘value of cultural membership’ derives from the fact that it provides an essential‘context of choice’ that determines ‘the range of options’ from which individualmembers of particular cultural communities choose. See Kymlicka, Liberalism,Community and Culture, pp. 164–8 and Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. 84–93. Others claim that culture is valuable because it is functional to theinterests of its individual members in being able ‘not only . . . to identify with agroup’, but also, and more importantly, to establish and sustain their ‘personalidentity’. See Margalit and Halbertal, ‘Liberalism and the Right to Culture’, pp. 501–2, 505. These rival ways of defending the value of cultural membership arenot obviously incompatible. Indeed, even those who emphasize one or the otherinterest regularly recognize that culture is important both in grounding identity andin defining options. See, for instance, Margalit and Halbertal, ‘Liberalism and theRight to Culture’, pp. 497–8, Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, pp. 175–7, Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 105, and Raz, Ethics in thePublic Domain, pp. 176–8.

25. Thus Carens claims that ‘the most powerful argument in favor of the policy’ ofprotecting ‘traditional’ Fijian culture ‘is the role that it played in preserving thenative Fijians from the fate suffered by indigenous peoples’ elsewhere. And, heresponds to critics of that policy by suggesting that, even acknowledging its obviouscosts, ‘it is possible that alternative policies would have been likely to lead to evenworse consequences’ (DRD: 599, 603, 622). Compare Kymlicka, Liberalism,Community and Culture, p. 170.

26. Any given culture is both indeterminate and contingent in a historical andcontinuing sense. This contingency is inherent, in so far as all cultures are bothsocially constructed and strategically contested, and so stand in need of justification.See James Johnson, ‘Symbol and Strategy in Comparative Political Analysis’,APSA-CP: Newsletter of the APSA Organized Section in Comparative Politics(summer): pp. 6–9; Johnson, ‘Why Respect Culture?’; and Johnson, ‘InventingConstitutional Traditions’. Compare Carens, (DRD: 551–2).

27. See Johnson, ‘Why Respect Culture?’ and Jeremy Waldron, ‘Minority Cultures andthe Cosmopolitan Alternative’, University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 25(1992): pp. 751–93.

28. Liberals do indeed commonly insist that individuals have a right to their ownculture. See, for example, Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture, p. 177;Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 105; Margalit and Halbertal, ‘Liberalismand the Right to Culture’, pp. 502–6; and Allen Buchanan, Secession, (Boulder, CO:Westview Press, 1991), p. 54. Unfortunately, they offer little by way of convincingargument to back this claim. Margalit and Halbertal, ‘Liberalism and the Right toCulture’, pp. 502–6, simply assert that individuals are entitled to their own identityand so, since (on their account) culture is necessary to personal identity, individualsare by extension entitled to their own culture. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship,


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pp. 84–93, defends his position by invoking the effort and cost that individuals andgroups must bear if, due to the demise (actual or anticipated) of their own culture,they must integrate themselves into another.

29. For the purposes of my argument, I accept the historical account of Fijian politicsthat Carens offers.

30. Note that the political and economic dimensions of this arrangement were closelyconnected to the extent that the indigenous chiefs exercised power over thecommunal units to which the colonial policy granted property rights.

31. The population gap first narrowed in the 1970s and 1980s, and then reversed assubstantial numbers of Fijian Indians emigrated in the wake of the 1987 coup.While I cannot explore the issue here, it seems clear that the relative proportions ofpopulation on the islands is endogenously determined by political factors. SeeCarens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community, pp. 206, 211, 218, 222. That said,subsequent events (circa June 2000) make clear that indigenous Fijians remainedunable to sustain their ‘traditional’ political and economic prerogatives bydemocratic means.

32. As I revised this essay in early June 2000, it appeared that contemporary events inFiji were playing out a quite similar dynamic. Indigenous Fijians, once again,overthrew a democratically elected Labour government and insisted onconstitutional revisions to ensure their political-economic prerogatives. Thus, itseems that the tentative optimism that Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community,pp. 250–3 voices is misplaced.

33. Although I here confine my comments to the Fijian case, it seems that this statementholds of traditions more generally. For examples of the ways that the Britishinvented tradition for political purposes both at home and across the empire, seeEric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1983). For extensions of that insight to morecontemporary cultural politics, see Johnson, ‘Inventing Constitutional Traditions’.

34. See, for instance, Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. 43–4, 51–2.35. Carens acknowledges that the distributional consequences are stark in the Fijian

case. For example, as a result of prohibitions on selling land to non-natives, nativeFijians control roughly 82 percent of the land on the islands. Unsurprisingly, thisskewed distribution of resources ‘has been a great source of power for them inrelation to other groups’ (DRD: 595).

36. See Jack Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1992). To identify some social or political arrangement as anequilibrium simply means that relevant agents are doing what is best for themselvesgiven what they expect relevant others to do. Yet, to identify some social orpolitical arrangement as an equilibrium entails no judgment regarding the normativeattractiveness or otherwise of that arrangement. On this regularly overlooked point,see Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior (New York: W.W.Norton, 1978), pp. 25–7. Institutions, from this perspective, stand in need ofjustification. Moreover, our normative assessments of various institutionalarrangements trade heavily upon our understanding of the causal mechanisms thatexplain how particular arrangements emerged as equilibria. Our assessments ofinstitutional arrangements (‘traditional’ or otherwise) necessarily depend, that is, onthe origins of those arrangements.


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37. See Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict and Jean Ensminger and Jack Knight,‘Changing Social Norms: Common Property, Bridewealth, and Clan Exogamy’,Current Anthropology 38 (1997): pp. 1–14. This account of how social and politicalactors create and sustain equilibrium institutions is contested. I do not defend ithere. For a brief, persuasive defense, see Jack Knight, ‘Models, Interpretations andTheories: Constructing Explanations of Institutional Emergence and Change’, inExplaining Social Institutions, edited by Jack Knight and Itai Sened (Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 1995). That said, it seems that the Fijian caseconforms to this account just to the extent that a subset of the indigenous elite, withthe backing of their allies in the British colonial administration, were able to commitcredibly to a set of ‘traditional’ political-economic arrangements, leaving theirdomestic competitors and others who might object little choice but to comply.

38. Here Carens seeks to subvert observations of the sort made by, for instance,Waldron, ‘Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative’ and ChandranKukathas, ‘Are There Any Cultural Rights?’, Political Theory 20 (1992): pp. 105–39.

39. Carens himself characterizes the native chiefs as ‘a privileged elite primarilyconcerned with protecting their own interests’ (DRD: 630). And, it is simply notadequate to suggest, as Carens rightly does, that elites in any democracy maysimilarly be characterized. Among the most central tasks of democratic theory is theeffort to criticize and devise effective constraints on the inevitable venal or myopicpropensities of political actors, especially public representatives.

40. Many of my criticisms of Carens concentrate on distributional conflicts internal tothe native Fijian population rather than on the aggregate political-economic statuseither of native Fijians or of Fijian Indians. Arguably, however, the presence of theFijian Indians has made the task of reforming political-economic arrangements onthe islands both more pressing and more difficult. The task was more pressingbecause those arrangements put the Fijian Indians at a special disadvantage. It wasmore difficult because the native elite could (and, as Carens intimates, did) invokeand exaggerate the threat that the Fijian Indians posed in their efforts to discouragedissent.

41. None of the factors mentioned in this paragraph, of course, prevent us fromcriticizing colonialism more generally. Despite the apprehensions that Carensexpresses (DRD: 602–3), it is possible to both condemn colonialism and concedethat, in defending themselves, the native Fijians not only shifted a burden ontoothers, but bear some responsibility for that. And, in changed circumstances, thatculpability surely suggests a much less sanguine assessment than the one Carensadvances.

42. In part, the problem here is that Carens treats costs and benefits purely in aggregateterms and thus neglects distributional issues (for example, DRD: 575, 594, 601). Hethus presumes that native Fijians share a more or less homogeneous interest towhich their ‘traditional’ institutions were and continue to be conducive. But thatshared interest is just what the indigenous elite who constructed ‘traditions’ on theislands in the first place intended to establish.

43. For a more extended argument on this point, see Jack Knight and James Johnson,‘Political Consequences of Pragmatism’, Political Theory 24 (1996): pp. 68–96. Inaddition to the argument that I present in the text, one might (as Carens, Culture,


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Citizenship, and Community, pp. 81, 99, 233 suggests) explore the possibility thatthe compliance of native Fijians (and, I would add, of Fijian Indians) with‘traditional’ political-economic arrangements is sustained by adaptive preferenceformation. On this mechanism more generally see chapter three in Jon Elster, SourGrapes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). I will not pursue thispossibility here.

44. On this point more generally see Paul Seabright, ‘Managing Local Commons: Theoretical Issues in Incentive Design’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 7 (1993):pp. 1113–34. In the case at hand, Carens concedes both that colonial policies exacer-bated divisions between indigenous Fijians and Fijian Indians and that the native elitesubsequently have invoked those divisions to consolidate and maintain its own power.

45. Michael Taylor, The Possibility of Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1987).

46. Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1960).

47. Carens’s sketch of post-colonial electoral politics on Fiji nicely illustrates thecoordination problems that attend efforts to mobilize effective electoral opposition(DRD: 568–74). On the central role of coordination problems in electoral politicsmore generally see Gary Cox, Making Votes Count (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1997). On the ways that political leaders can exploit suchcoordination problems see Randall Calvert, ‘Leadership and Its Basis in Problems ofSocial Coordination’, International Political Science Review 13 (1992): pp. 7–24.

48. Here it is important to recognize that any assessment of ‘plausibility’ rests oncontestable judgments of what was and is politically possible. I see no reason tothink that the early colonial administration on Fiji was incapable of identifying andimposing an alternative to the options mentioned in the text. After all, it provedcapable of designing the ‘traditional’ arrangements that Carens is concerned todefend even though those particular arrangements departed from both pre-colonialinstitutions as well as from colonial arrangements elsewhere. This observation, ofcourse, is contingent on historical and empirical matters that I am poorly placed toassess. It is important to note, however, that the complex criteria for moral andpolitical judgment that Carens defends presume that there exist multiple institutionalequilibria in just the sense I suggest here. On his account, some policy orinstitutional arrangement is ‘morally permissible’ in a given historical circumstanceif it represents ‘one possible set of steps it was legitimate to take even though other,quite different ones might also not have been wrong’. Thus, he insists that ‘theentrenchment of inalienable land rights is morally permissible because it offers oneway to protect interests that most Fijians regard as vital and that would bevulnerable in the absence of this institutional arrangement because of collectiveaction problems’ (DRD: 599, 608).

49. Carens notes that indigenous political practices also included much less hierarchicalauthority relations than those embodied in extant patterns of chiefly rule. So theBritish might well have implemented some other structure of political authority.

50. This is true of the coup in May–June 2000 as well.51. One clearly can interpret the support and actions of the Labour government in

different ways. Their primary base of support was among Fijian Indians, but theyalso garnered nearly 10 percent of the native Fijian vote. They named a native Fijian


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prime minister and they distributed remaining ministerial portfolios among bothindigenous and Indian Fijians. All of this seems to suggest that they might well havebeen able to make democratic progress toward a more egalitarian, multi-ethnicsociety.

52. Note that this position converges with the liberal view that the value of culturalmembership derives from its consequences for sustaining identity. Note also thatCarens is under some pressure here to explain why, if the native Fijians have acultural rather than instrumental attachment to the land, they nevertheless faced acollective action problem so severe that they required strict legal prohibitions on thesale of land to non-natives. In short, why, if the land is central to indigenous Fijianidentity, would they have been inclined (short of the ever-present possibilities offorce and fraud) to sell it? This question is especially pressing in so far as Carensfinds himself drawn to the view that native Fijian culture ‘embodies principles ofmutual caring and reciprocity, that places concern for the common good aboveindividual advantage, and that discourages acquisitiveness and encourages respectfor others’ (DRD: 620–1). Such cultural qualities by themselves surely would havedampened considerably any collective action problem that native Fijians faced withrespect to land ownership.

53. On the symbolic dimensions of land reform more generally see Katherine Verdery,‘Transnationalism, Nationalism, Citizenship, and Property: Eastern Europe since1989’, American Ethnologist 25 (1998): pp. 291–306.

54. See Johnson, ‘Symbol and Strategy in Comparative Political Analysis’; Johnson,‘Why Respect Culture?’; and Johnson, ‘Inventing Constitutional Traditions’.

55. This is, unless I am mistaken, one position that Carens is concerned to deflate(DRD: 614). More recently, he has suggested that: ‘To avoid misunderstanding, letme emphasize that I am not claiming that cultural practices and institutions deservepolitical recognition and support simply because they are regarded as authentic bythose who participate in them. Rather I am trying to criticize the idea that culturalpractices and institutions can be shown to be inauthentic (and hence unworthy ofsupport) if they can be shown to be contingent, constructed artifacts that havechanged over time and that serve the interests of some more than others’. SeeCarens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community, p. 241. Carens seems to be onsomewhat dubious ground here. While he does hedge his claims regardingauthenticity in the various ways I note above, the very language of authenticityimpels him toward just the sort of position he here seeks to evade.

56. This is a broad statement that I cannot defend here. Yet, it also is a view thatattracts considerable support from a variety of theoretical perspectives. See JackKnight and James Johnson, ‘Aggregation and Deliberation: On the Possibility ofDemocratic Legitimacy’, Political Theory 22 (1994): p. 290, note 9.

57. See, for example, Knight and Johnson, ‘Aggregation and Deliberation: On thePossibility of Democratic Legitimacy’; Jack Knight and James Johnson, ‘What Sortof Equality Does Democratic Deliberation Require?’, in Deliberative Democracy,edited by James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). Thatsaid, Martha Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1999), p. 122 surely is correct to observe that our own practices need not be whollyabove reproach before we can justifiably question practices and arrangementselsewhere that appear objectionable.


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58. This may prompt the sort of reflective self-examination of local practices andattachments that both liberals such as Kymlicka and communitarians such as Taylorendorse. This, in turn, may induce indigenous agents either to revise or to embracemore fully their cultural commitments. It may also induce external critics to revisetheir own views and standards. In this sense, the view I sketch here also requiresthat inhabitants of western societies must be responsive, in just the same way, whencritics challenge either the criteria by which we assess others or our own institutionsand practices. It is crucial to recognize that, in either case, indigenous agents(whether these be others or ourselves) may fail in their efforts to justify theirseemingly objectionable cultural practices.

59. The view I sketch here in no way implies that reasoned argument will issue inagreement or consensus. Indeed, it is entirely possible that political argument of thesort I sketch here will exacerbate conflict over fundamental issues. See Knight andJohnson, ‘Aggregation and Deliberation: On the Possibility of DemocraticLegitimacy’; James Johnson, ‘Arguing for Deliberation’, in DeliberativeDemocracy, edited by Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);and Amy Gutmann, ‘The Challenge of Multiculturalism in Political Ethics’,Philosophy & Public Affairs 22 (1993): pp. 171–206.

60. The conditions and contours of such processes are beyond the scope of this paper.For provocative, if preliminary, explorations of cross-cultural argument, see BhikhuParekh, ‘Minority Practices and Principles of Toleration’, International MigrationReview 30 (1996): pp. 251–84 and, especially, Michael Rabinder James, ‘CriticalIntercultural Dialogue’, Polity 31 (1999): pp. 587–607 and Michael Rabinder James,‘Tribal Sovereignty and the Intercultural Public Sphere’, Philosophy and SocialCriticism 25 (1999): pp. 57–86. More generally, see Johnson, ‘Arguing forDeliberation’; Knight and Johnson, ‘Aggregation and Deliberation: On thePossibility of Democratic Legitimacy’; and Knight and Johnson, ‘What Sort ofEquality Does Democratic Deliberation Require?’

61. Anne Phillips, The Politics of Presence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 9. A dynamic very much like this seems to have emerged from the culturalpolitics on Fiji (DRD: 569–70). The recurrent coups in Fiji, first in 1987 and againin 2000, suggest that indigenous Fijians, at least, view defense of their ‘authentic’traditions and practices (regardless of whether they would use that terminology) as alegitimate pretext for overthrowing democratically elected regimes.

62. Stephen Holmes, ‘Gag Rules and the Politics of Omission’, in Constitutionalismand Democracy, edited by Jon Elster and Rune Slagstad (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1988). Holmes offers the establishment clause of the USConstitution as an exemplar of such an exclusionary strategy.

63. In the current context, R.B. Friedman, ‘On the Concept of Authority in PoliticalPhilosophy’, in Authority, edited by Joseph Raz (New York: NYU Press, 1990) isinstructive to the extent that he (i) explores the countervailing pressures of authorityand justification and (ii) traces the way authority depends on recognition of thesymbolically marked identity of those who can claim it. Conversely, it is importantto note that in democratic settings ‘authorities cannot hide behind tradition orpower’. See Mark Warren, ‘Deliberative Democracy and Authority’, AmericanPolitical Science Review 90 (1996): p. 47.


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liberalism and the politics of cultural authenticity - politics, philosophy & economics (2002)

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