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MULTINATIONAL CIVIC EDUCATION
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Citizenship and Education in Liberal-Democratic
Societies: Teaching for Cosmopolitan Values and
Collective Identities
Kevin McDonough and Walter Feinberg
Print publication date: 2003
Print ISBN-13: 9780199253661
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2005
DOI: 10.1093/0199253668.001.0001
MULTINATIONAL CIVIC EDUCATION
Kevin McDonough (Contributor Webpage)
DOI:10.1093/0199253668.003.0014
Abstract and Keywords
The essays in Part III of the book, on liberal constraints and
traditionalist education, argue for a more regulatory conception of
liberal education and emphasize the need for some controls over
cultural and religious educational authority. Kevin McDonough’s essay,
on multinational civic education, develops a conception of this that
allows for both federal and minority national groups to reinforce
conditional civic attachments. This ‘conditionalist’ view of civic
education is necessary in multinational federal societies, he argues,
because appeals to one set of national attachments may exacerbate
rather than alleviate particular injustices in particular circumstances.
For example, McDonough argues that when aboriginal women and
children are the victims of injustice at the hands of tribal institutions
and leaders, they must be able to appeal to their fellow non-aboriginal
citizens and federal institutions for assistance, although this is not
possible unless citizens – aboriginal and otherwise – have come to
regard attachments to the minority nation as conditional rather than
absolute. Similarly, citizens whose primary identification is to the
federal society must be able to recognize that some of their fellow
citizens legitimately have a minority nation as the object of their
primary loyalty – otherwise, efforts to support federal intervention in
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minority national affairs will be vulnerable to forces of cultural
insensitivity and arrogance, rather than of liberal justice.
Keywords: civic education, conditional civic attachments, conditionalism, cultural
authority, educational authority, federal institutions, federal national groups, federal
society, liberal education, liberalism, minority national groups, multinational federal
societies, multinationalism, primary loyalty, religious authority, traditionalist education
13.1. Introduction
The main purpose of this chapter is to develop a justification for a
conception of what I shall call multinational civic education. This
conception of civic education addresses the particular circumstances
and problems of political stability and justice in multination states,
which incorporate more than one nation within the borders of a single
country—the larger, federal nation along with one or more minority
national groups. Membership in each of these nations usually entails a
sense of national loyalty—a particularistic attachment on the part of
individuals to a group, its laws, and institutions. In most multination
states, a majority of citizens identify most strongly with the federal
nation, while some citizens identify most strongly with a minority
nation (e.g. Québécois or Aboriginal peoples within Canada, the
Catalans in Spain, the Flemish in Belgium, the Scots in the United
Kingdom). As such, they often identify with the federal nation only
weakly and provisionally. Sometimes these different national loyalties
do not conflict and can be nicely nested together. However, conflicts
can and sometimes do arise, and an adequate conception of
multinational civic education needs to address problems that arise
when they do.
Problems of political instability and justice in multination states are
therefore unique in a couple of important ways. First, unlike civic
education in most nation-states, the predicament facing multinational
civic education is not that an existing, established, and robust national
identity is now threatened and needs to be reinforced (and perhaps
redefined) in light of new forms of diversity, for example, those that
follow in the train of new patterns of immigration. Rather, in the first
place, multination states typically lack a strong overlapping
national identity based on mutual trust and solidarity, and there are
powerful historical forces that are likely to interfere with educational
attempts to create such an identity. Past attempts by the majority
nation to colonize and repress minority national movements, sometimes
brutally, have given rise to feelings of mutual suspicion and distrust
that are now firmly imprinted on political discourse in multination
states. While these feelings are perhaps understandable in light of the
abysmal historical record, they now entail immense costs for social
justice in multination states. Citizens from the majority national group
(p.352)
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may respond listlessly or with indifference when members of other
national groups are treated unjustly. When members of minority
national groups are victims of injustice within their minority national
groups, they often lack confidence in the federal institutions of justice
that might offer them alternative recourse. In Section 13.2 of this
chapter, I suggest a way in which multinational civic education might
justify the aim of promoting a shared federal identity of solidarity and
justice that addresses such problems.
A second and related problem arises because minority national groups
demand the right to self-government and national self- determination,
and as a result the political instability of multination states is especially
acute. Liberalism's commitment to tolerance and cultural respect
demands that multination states accommodate the right to national self-
determination for minority national groups. However, the limits of
liberal tolerance and respect are tested when the minority national
culture is pervasively illiberal. In this case, the illiberal culture and
political principles of the minority nation conflict sharply with the
liberal principles and civic culture of the federal nation. Questions arise
in this context about the circumstances under which the liberal federal
state may act to force illiberal minority nations to respect liberal
principles, or to support efforts from within to liberalize the national
culture. In Section 13.3, I justify a multinational civic educational aim of
promoting cultural respect as respect for the minority national right to
self-determination.
Ultimately, the conception of multinational civic education I defend in
this chapter seeks to foster conditional identities at both the federal
and minority national levels. The justification for promoting a shared
federal civic identity depends on the need to secure conditions for
justice at the federal level when members of minority national groups
are subject to grievous injustices within their group, and particularly
when they require recourse for justice outside of their group. This
requires that members of minority national groups develop
capacities and dispositions that enable them to see their minority
national loyalties as conditional. The justification for cultural respect as
respect for minority national self-determination depends on the need to
ensure that the aim of promoting a shared federal identity does not
undermine the legitimate demands of minority national groups to
govern themselves. I argue that this requires an education that fosters
an affirmative understanding of the conditional nature of both federal
and minority national identities. In Section 13.4, I briefly outline some
practical difficulties related to issues of feasibility and implementation,
(p.353)
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and argue that while there are significant obstacles to realizing
multinational civic education in practice, the project is not hopeless.
Throughout the chapter I draw heavily on examples from the Canadian
context in order to illuminate more general features of multinational
civic education. Canadians have recently become polarized around
opposing and uncompromising declarations of national identity, and
many have lost faith in the ability of the federal and provincial
governments cooperatively to develop a coherent and cohesive vision of
the nation at all.1 Much of this lack of confidence and incoherence
arises from confusion surrounding issues related to Canada's
multinational character. Some argue that the federal state has a strong
obligation to accommodate minority national identities through the
recognition of special rights to national self-determination and self-
government, including extensive control over education and schools.
Contrastingly, many others believe there is something deeply wrong
with the idea that some groups should have powers of self-government
that are denied to other groups. Instead, they argue that liberal
commitments to equality require the federal nation to grant equal
powers to all provincial and territorial governments within the
federation, even though some of these governments represent groups
who define themselves as distinct nations and others do not. People in
this camp sometimes also regard policies that assign special
recognition and rights to minority national groups as somehow
demeaning to members of the rest of the nation. As one prominent
Canadian recently put it: “If Quebec is a distinct society, then what are
the rest of us—so much chopped liver?“2 In any case, the result of this
polarized debate is that few people are satisfied with the status quo and
many are deeply confused as to what the status quo should be. The fact
that constitutional issues are now largely dormant in Canadian political
discourse does not necessarily reflect the emergence of a more
confident, coherent, and stable sense of Canada's multinational
character; and there is little understanding of how civic
education should address issues of political stability, justice, and
diversity when it comes to transnational relations in the multination
state.
Amid the recent explosion of scholarly literature on the issue of civic
education and diversity in liberal democratic societies, the question of
how civic education should be specifically structured and justified in
order to address issues of national stability, justice, and diversity in
multination states has not received sustained critical attention. One
reason for this may have to do with the shameful history of civic
educational practices in multination states. To mention just one
(p.354)
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example, agents of the federal government in Canada near the turn of
the twentieth century often withheld food and other neces-sary rations
so that Indian parents would part with their children and allow them to
attend industrial schools. Once under the jurisdiction of these schools,
Indian children were subjected to an education that “was intended to
be the culmination of an education designed to sever young Indians’
connections with their ancestral culture.”3 Thus, according to Indian
commissioner Hayter Reed, “every effort should be directed against
anything calculated to keep fresh in the memories of children habits
and associations which it is one of the main objects of industrial schools
to obliterate.”4 Due in part to this history, contemporary policies of
multinational civic education that seek to foster a strong sense of
solidarity across national lines are likely to be condemned by many on
the grounds that they are oppressive and imperialistic. Nevertheless,
multination societies need to address problems of justice, political
instability, and conflict that traverse national borders and, so long as
they do, there are powerful reasons to seek a justification for some
form of civic education that can develop capacities and dispositions
citizens need in order to address these issues through common
citizenship in the federal nation.
13.2. Multinational Civic Education for Shared Federal Identity
Underpinning the justification for multinational civic education that I
seek to develop in this chapter is an important distinction between
instrumental justifications for promoting national identities, on the one
hand, and intrinsic justifications, on the other. Liberal theorists who
would justify civic education's role in promoting a shared national
identity do so on instrumental grounds. They argue that having
a shared national identity reinforces liberal principles of justice and
helps rectify injustices. For example, standing up when another's right
to freedom of association or freedom of conscience is threatened often
takes courage and requires sacrifice, and I am more likely to act
courageously and make the required sacrifices if I see myself and
others as part of a larger shared community. As Will Kymlicka puts it:
“We know that people are more likely to make sacrifices for others if
these others are viewed as ‘one of us,‘ and so promoting a sense of
national identity strengthens the sense of mutual obligation needed to
sustain liberal justice.”5 In contrast, republican theories of citizenship
and civic education assign intrinsic value to civic participa-tion, and
hence to the identity citizens share as participants in national political
debate and decision making.6 On this view, the state has good reason to
tilt the playing field of civic education so that citizens will view their
civic identities as intrinsically valuable components of their overall
conception of the good life.7 What matters for republicans is just that I
(p.355)
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come to see myself as a citizen of this particular territory, shared with
this particular group of people and their ancestors, which provides
“continuity between their own lives and the lives of their ancestors.”8
As Kymlicka points out, an intrinsic civic identity expresses something
like the “essential nature” of a people; and the identity matters for its
own sake, regardless of the ways in which it might breach the
requirements of liberal justice.
These two views are not strictly incompatible because there is no
obvious reason that there cannot be intrinsic value to civic participation
in liberal-civic nations. Some liberal citizens may see their identity as
civic participants as valuable for its own sake, while also recognizing
that liberal principles set important limits to the ways in which shared
civic identity can be promoted or pursued. Notably, contemporary
republican theorists do not express (at least explicitly) a taste for
promoting intrinsically valuable civic identities even when doing so
comes at the expense of liberal justice. Rather, they tend to frame their
arguments for republican citizenship in ways that implicitly or explicitly
acknowledge liberal constraints on promoting republican civic
identities. For example, Kymlicka points out that Michael Sandel's
recent defense of republican citizenship does not contain a single
instance in which he approves of promoting civic identities when doing
so comes at the expense of liberal justice.9 I could find no such cases in
David Miller's or Richard Dagger's recent defenses of republican civic
virtue either.10 In any case, neither Miller nor Sandel provide
arguments to defend such measures, while Dagger explicitly defends
liberal constraints on the promotion of republican civic
virtues.11 When Miller does criticize liberal theories of citizenship he
presents his argument for republican citizenship in opposition to a
“purely political” view of liberal citizenship, in which citizens are bound
together solely by their allegiance to liberal principles of justice.12
Similarly, Miller contrasts his republican conception of national identity,
which is “committed to non-neutrality where the national culture itself
is at stake” in contrast to a liberal view that is committed to a policy of
“cultural neutrality.”13 However, no such contrast exists when these
two considerations are applied to the liberal-instrumentalist view,
because that view is committed neither to cultural neutrality nor to
promoting civic bonds based solely on shared principles. Rather, it
advocates promoting a shared, non-neutral civic identity whose value is
judged ultimately by how well it serves liberal principles of justice, not
by how much it promotes republican political participation. The point I
want to emphasize, therefore, is that there are good reasons to believe
that there is considerable overlap between contemporary republican
(p.356)
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and liberal-instrumentalist justifications for promoting shared civic
identities.14
Nevertheless, it makes an important difference whether the civic
educational aim of promoting an overarching national identity is
justified on instrumental or intrinsic grounds. In multination states,
people can presumably engage in intrinsically valuable projects of
political deliberation both at the level of the minority nation and at that
of the federal nation. To this extent, the republican model can be
coherently applied to multinational civic education. However, in some
cases national identities at the minority and federal level conflict, and
the idea of an intrinsically valuable civic identity cannot by itself tell us
how to resolve such conflicts. If both federal and minority nations
promote intrinsically valuable identities, the notion of an intrinsic
national identity provides no way of determining the limits to the ways
in which a federal civic identity can be promoted in multination states.
For example, sometimes the best or most efficient way of promoting
intrinsic civic identities at the federal level may involve undermining
and even destroying minority national identities. I mentioned one such
example of Canadian educational attempts to “obliterate” the ancestral
identities of Indian children by assimilating them to the cultural habits
and associations of the dominant national culture. Kymlicka cites the
example of colonialist project of conquering, displacing, and colonizing
American Indians by westward expansion in the United States. He also
points out that governments sometimes invent threats (e.g. illegal
immigrants, gays and lesbians, drug users, terrorists) in order to
promote civic participation.15 The more general problem these
examples are meant to illustrate is that when national identities
conflict, sometimes promoting intrinsically valuable activities of civic
participation at one level entails imposing injustice, either within the
nation itself or upon another nation. Consequently, when conflicts arise
between different intrinsically valuable civic identities, we need some
way of evaluating such conflicts and determining how they are best
resolved.
The liberal instrumentalist justification suggests an argument for
multinational civic education that addresses the problem of conflicting
federal and minority national identities, which, given the overlap
between liberal and republican views noted above, should be attractive
both to liberals and to republican theorists with liberal scruples. That
argument is that multinational civic education should seek to promote a
shared civic identity so long as doing so respects core liberal
commitments such as freedom of conscience, association, and
expression. This argument is perhaps more complex than it initially
(p.357)
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appears to be. I now want to examine this complexity by looking at
some not so obvious difficulties in establishing a credible justification
for civic educational policies aimed at promoting civic solidarity in
multination states.
Liberal civic education seeks to foster a range of virtues and attitudes
that demand critical self-examination in deliberating with others on
issues of significance to the nation. Furthermore, the civic educational
project of fostering a shared, federal civic identity is likely to have
significant “spillover” effects on other spheres of life. Stephen Macedo
points out that liberal civic education has the effect of “promoting
certain broad patterns of life” that are likely to powerfully influence
(some would say manipulate) the way in which individuals understand
and orient themselves to the minority nation as well.16 Thus, even if a
theory of civic education is carefully circumscribed to foster such
patterns only with respect to issues directly relevant to issues of
political debate and justice at the level of federal citizenship, any
competent execution of that theory will effect that spillover and
potentially undermine or threaten minority national cultures. These
effects need not be undesirable. Some cultures may be so pervasively
indecent and unjust that they are worthy of being undermined. In this
case, it may be best to educate citizens for solidarity and justice at the
federal level even if this undermines the minority nation. But in many
cases minority national cultures, including illiberal ones, can and do
provide a variety of substantial benefits to individual members who
value their national identity. Nationalist education within the minority
group may seek to ensure that these benefits are available for
future members of the group by reinforcing and strengthening the
loyalty members feel toward the nation, its institutions, and its
traditions. If these groups are culturally illiberal, they may be deplored
from a liberal point of view. However, given the benefits that illiberal
national cultures provide for their members, enforcing any conception
of civic education that may undermine or radically transform another
culture cannot be undertaken lightly or recklessly.
A further difficulty in establishing an instrumental justification
promoting federal loyalties through civic education involves
recognizing that minority national groups have a right to national self-
determination, and the project of national self-determination cannot be
realized in practice unless a group has a significant degree of self-
government. For example, national cultures almost always have a
public dimension that is expressed, for example, in the way a particu-
lar group understands its relationship to the landscape, its distinctive
art forms, architecture, and, notably, the content of national education.
(p.358)
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Furthermore, as David Miller points out, in order for these aspects of a
national culture to flourish, they must be subject to a significant degree
of collective control.17 This is probably particularly true of minority
national cultures that are always vulner-able to the greater power of
the dominant majority culture of the larger multination state within
which it resides. If cultural expressions are completely left to the whims
of competitive markets, especially in this context, it is perhaps
especially likely that the national culture will be overwhelmed and
taken over to a large extent by the more inexpensive cultural products
of large scale, mass market economies.18 As Miller says, under these
conditions, “national cultures can decay without anybody intending that
this should happen.”19 The best, and perhaps only, way in which this
sort of cultural decay can be prevented, or at least the best possible
way of safeguarding minority national cultures against the corrosive
effects of mass global culture on minority national groups, is to give
control of it to those who share it.20
Thus, proponents of such multinational civic education must be able to
tell a realistic and convincing story about the substantial bene-fits civic
educational policies aimed at promoting a federal identity can promise,
and why these benefits outweigh those offered by the existing national
culture. Furthermore, the story must include an account of how these
benefits can be promoted in ways that respect what is legitimate in
minority national groups’ demands for the right to national self-
determination and self-government. To the extent that such a
story can be told, multinational civic education is justified in educating
for loyalty to the federal nation. However, I have suggested that in
some cases it will be possible to develop such arguments, but in other
cases it will not. In some cases, the best available arguments will tell us
that policies of civic education aimed at fostering loyalty to the federal
nation will backfire, with profoundly illiberal consequences. Or they
may be able to determine only tentative or minor achievements for
liberal principles at the federal level. To this extent, attempts to justify
civic education at the federal level on liberal grounds will be
correspondingly unimpressive, and will instead smack of the sort of
cultural arrogance and insensitivity that has often characterized the
history of relations between federal and minority nations in multination
states. It does not follow from this point that liberal—instrumental
arguments must fail to provide an adequate justification for
multinational civic education's role in promoting federal civic loyalties.
However, it does require that the best arguments will justify only a
conditional and provisional role for civic education in promoting federal
civic loyalties.
(p.359)
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This argument for a “conditionalist” conception of multinational civic
education obviously stands in need of further justification and, in the
remainder of this section, I develop in more detail the argument for a
conditionalist conception of multinational civic education. A
conditionalist view says that multinational civic education can foster a
shared civic identity at the federal level, and it can teach that cit-izens
are sometimes obliged to give priority to their loyalty of the federal
nation. However, it cannot teach that members of minority nations are
always obliged to do so when their national identities conflict. In what
follows, I develop this justification against the backdrop of a particular
liberal objection to the conditionalist alternative.
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Justifying the Conditionalist Conception of Multinational Civic Education
In order to understand the liberal objection to the conditionalist
conception of multinational civic education, we need to take a closer
look at the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism. A familiar
way of drawing this distinction highlights contrasting views about what
gives a nation its cohesion. Accordingly, ethnic nationalism is a tribal,
strongly communalist phenomenon that is thoroughly at odds with
Western, liberal individualist principles. Ethnic nations seek cohesion
based on shared descent and common blood, or shared religion. People
who share in the relevant ethnicity, race, or religion can have
citizenship, while others cannot. Alternatively, civic nations seek
cohesion on the basis of shared political principles, and citizenship is
open in principle to anyone who wants to live within their borders,
regardless of race, religion, or ethnicity, and who willingly endorses the
nation's constitutional principles.
Some liberals have thought this distinction rules out the conditionalist
option for multinational citizenship because they assume that minority
national identities are necessarily “ethnic” nations, and any policy that
accommodates minority nationalism ensures that individuals are tied to
ethnically exclusive, oppressive, and freedom restricting cultures. They
argue that liberal-democratic norms are not organic to, and thus cannot
be effectively fostered within, many minority national cultures. As such,
minority national loyalties are impervious to, and incompatible with, the
teachings of liberal civic education, including respect for the values of
personal autonomy, reciprocity, mutual respect, and freedom of
association.
If we accept the assumption that minority nationalism is an inherently
illiberal, ethnic phenomenon then the conditionalist position becomes
considerably less alluring from a liberal point of view, because liberal
purposes will always, or nearly always, be best served more
straightforwardly, by reeducating members of minority nations so that
their loyalties to the minority nation are weakened or eradicated and
those to the federal nation strengthened. According to this view, civic
education for loyalty to the federal nation represents the hope of
individual freedom and growth, equality and cross-cultural dialogue,
and peace, while education for allegiance to the minority nation
represents the danger of communal oppression, nationalist violence
and conflict, and cultural parochialism.21 In what follows, I refer to this
as the liberal assimilationist alternative to the conditionalist argument.
However, there is no reason to accept the assimilationist alternative
because there is no reason to accept the assumption that minority
nationalism is an inherently ethnic phenomenon. In fact, it is crucially
(p.360)
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important to stress that nations, including illiberal minority nations,
have a civic dimension.22 For example, minority national groups like the
Québécois clearly define their culture predominantly in liberal and
“civic” terms, as involving membership in a societal culture committed
to liberal principles of free association, free speech, and freedom of
conscience. Citizenship in these societies is open to all regardless of
ethnic descent, religious belief, or race. Of course, even predominantly
liberal and civic minority national cultures contain some illiberal,
exclusive, and “ethnic” features. Some Quebec nationalists
articulate their nationalist aspirations in “ethnic” or racial terms,
employing terms such as Québécois “pure laine” to distinguish
authentic from inauthentic Quebecers, such as ethnic immig-rant
groups.23 It is worth noting that in this respect, Quebec is no different
from many civic nations, such as the United States, Canada, and the
United Kingdom, that contain extremist minority groups who would
define the nation in racially or religiously exclusive terms. Quebec also
famously legislates restrictions on freedom of association by setting up
strong barriers restricting access to English language schooling within
the province, and such laws may ultimately be unjustifiable from a
liberal point of view. Nevertheless, it would be a serious distortion to
suggest that accommodating Quebec's nationalist aspirations
necessarily serves “ethnic” and pervasively illiberal purposes, simply
because it incorporates certain illiberal minority groups, or because it
incorporates certain laws that are suspect from a liberal point of view.
In fact, the national culture of Quebec is predominantly both civic and
liberal.
This example may seem falsely tendentious because many minority
national groups, unlike Quebec, emphasize their cultural distinct-ness
by explicitly rejecting Western liberal values and by defining
themselves in ethnic terms. Kymlicka, for example, cites some
“spokespersons” for indigenous groups who argue that liberal-
democratic principles violate the “cultural integrity” of indigenous
cultures.24 However, even these minority nations may in fact be more
liberal (or less illiberal) and civic than they initially appear or claim to
be. For example, Kymlicka points out that minority national groups seek
exemptions from the Bill of Rights in the United States or Canada's
Charter of Rights not because they or their cultural traditions reject the
underlying principles of human rights, but for other, less obviously
illiberal, reasons. More specifically, minority national groups may seek
the same rights that other, established, majority nations have to restrict
the rights of outsiders to settle on tribal territories. They may do so not
in order to deprive individuals of liberal rights, but because
unrestricted settlement can be (and often is) used as a tool of political
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and cultural dominance, by ensuring that aboriginal people become a
minority within their own territory.25 Similarly, aboriginal peoples reject
federal control over tribal institutions, including schools. But they need
not do so because they are antipathetic to the liberal and democratic
cultural values that the federal nation claims to stand for. They may do
so because federal control has traditionally been a tool of colonization
and imperialism—forces that aboriginal groups have resisted and in the
face of which they have reasserted their independence as
nations. As such, the apparent parochialism and exclusiveness of
minority national groups may reflect a strategic response to issues of
power and dominance that underwrite relations between federal and
minority nations in multination states, and may provide little indication
by itself about the extent to which a minority nation's culture and
identity is in fact illiberal.26
As these examples illustrate, it is important to keep in mind that the
terms “liberal” and “illiberal”, or “civic” and “ethnic”, when used as
descriptors of actual national cultural groups, are not absolute, but
refer to degrees of cultural openness, individual freedom and political
participation, cultural pluralism, and heterogeneity.27 Different minority
national cultures are scattered at various points along these spectra.
They are not purely liberal or illiberal, ethnic or civic. Cultures are
impure, complex, and fragmented when viewed from the perspective of
liberal principles.28 Once we recognize this, it becomes possible to see
the demand by minority nations for the right to political autonomy and
national self-determination as expressing an aspiration to create
conditions of political and cultural security so that minority national
groups can better determine for themselves how and on what terms to
interact with the federal nation, and to enable members of the nation to
better decide for themselves what elements of other cultures to
incorporate into their own.29 This may or may not be a liberal
nationalist enterprise. In any case, liberals cannot simply assume
beforehand that minority national cultures are illiberal, even if their
own self-descriptions explicitly say so. As Kymlicka says, “the balance
between liberal and illiberal strands is something that can only be
determined empirically, not presupposed in advance.”30
Nevertheless, suppose we can, after careful examination of the
empirical evidence, be reasonably certain that a particular minority
national culture is deeply illiberal. This is clearly true of some groups.
These groups may have governments that have long non-democratic
traditions; they may have cultural traditions that explicitly or implicitly
reject liberal commitments, for example, to gender equality. They may
seek to foster a closed and exclusive culture that may restrict individual
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autonomy and freedom. To this extent, liberals have powerful reasons
to undermine such loyalties. However, there are also powerful liberal
reasons to restrict the extent to which the political and educational
policies of the federal state can seek to undermine minority national
identities. Some of these reasons become clear when we explicitly
distinguish the question of determining the illiberal identity of a
particular nation from the question of determining the likely
consequences of educational policies that attempt to undermine or
weaken that identity.
First, suppose civic educational policies aimed at promoting
attachments to liberal principles and to the federal nation initiate a
process of reflection that leads children from a minority national group
to question the illiberal and exclusive foundations of their culture. It
does not follow that this process of reflection will lead to a secure and
stable identification with the liberal federal state. Part of the reason for
this is that it is unlikely that there will be a ready made, secure, or
stable federal cultural identity waiting to replace the former
attachment to the minority national culture. To a significant extent, in
fact, the prevailing culture of the federal nation likely contains
substantial threads that are hostile to members of minority national
groups. It may be a racist or otherwise discriminatory culture that
threatens to undermine the self-respect and autonomy of members of
minority national groups. At the same time, the economically more
powerful and technologically advanced societal culture of the federal
nation offers numerous alluring opportunities that are unavailable in
the minority culture. Under these circumstances, many aboriginal
children in North America will grow up with a striking sense of
ambivalence toward both their traditional aboriginal identity and their
emerging identification with the federal nation. On the one hand, their
ancestral culture may be deeply cherished, as the culture of parents,
grandparents, and other loved ones, but also carry a stigma as a culture
doomed to failure in the face of the overwhelming dominance of the
Western culture that underwrites the larger multinational society. On
the other hand, the federal nation may be both an oppressive threat
and a potentially exciting arena for growth and opportunity. In this
context, it needs to be emphasized that, in multination states, the
project of building loyalty to the federal nation is rarely one of
strengthening an already deeply entrenched and stable common
federal–national identity. It is more often a project of building a
common national identity that exists only feebly and precariously. In
some cases, a minority national culture may have become so degraded,
and entail such atrocious injustices, that the culture may not be worth
saving. Here the only option may be for the federal nation to do the
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best it can to promote justice by educating for a stronger national
identity at the level of the federal nation. However, in other cases, it
may be best from a liberal point of view to try to support efforts to
strengthen children's sense of self-respect and autonomy by
accommodating or even supporting efforts to reinforce the
child's minority national identity, even if this means that children may
be slow or unlikely to soon develop a pervasive commitment to liberal
principles, and even if it comes at some expense to educational efforts
to promote loyalty to the federal nation. Under these circumstances,
civic educational policies that aim to promote federal loyalties, and that
undermine national loyalties and attachments, must be provisional in
the sense that when they are sensitive to their own potentially harmful
effects, they will recognize that sometimes the project of promoting
federal civic loyalties must be delayed or suitably abridged.31
The process of strengthening liberal federal loyalties can have a
number of other illiberal consequences as well. First, attempts by a
majority nation to forcibly assimilate minority nationalist groups can
and does provoke conflict, sometimes violent, between majority and
minority nations. Despite the best liberal intentions of liberals,
assimilationist policies are likely to be resisted by members of minority
nations as projects of colonization and oppression. One of the results of
this is that illiberal minority national cultures become radicalized and
militant, more parochial and more illiberal than they already are. Such
policies can trigger dormant illiberal tendencies in the minority
national culture, or stifle the development of liberal tendencies in the
culture, and perhaps defuse opportunities for cooperative dialogue
between the liberal federal nation and the illiberal minority nation.32 In
any case, I have argued that liberals must balance the potential harms
and benefits from a liberal point of view on both sides of the equation.
When they do, they cannot be presupposed in advance that the outcome
of such judgment will favor policies that promote loyalty to the federal
nation over policies that recommend accommodating illiberal minority
national loyalties. Most importantly, I have argued, even after close
examination of the best available arguments and evidence shows that a
particular minority national culture is pervasively illiberal,
multinational civic education may need to condition its aim of
developing federal civic loyalties in ways that accommodate minority
national groups and their educational aims.
There is still another crucially important consideration for which
multinational civic education must account in justifying the aim of
promoting federal civic loyalties. Minority national groups may reject
multinational civic education by appealing to the right to national self-
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determination. The liberal commitment to this right is not absolute, and
may be overridden in certain circumstances; but it cannot reasonably
be defeated simply by the fact that civic educational policies in
multination states can be credibly shown to avoid problems having to
do with the problems highlighted above—the provision of conditions for
self-respect and autonomy, and the threat of nationalist conflict and
radicalization, etc. For the rest of this section, I further develop the
justification for multinational civic education by taking up the issue of
the conditions under which federal governments in multination states
are justified in restricting the minority right to national self-
determination, by imposing coercive measures designed to force
minority national governments to respect liberal principles. In
particular, I argue that such measures are justified especially when the
rights of children are involved and when dissidents and reformers
within the minority nation invite or demand such measures.
The Case of Lester Desjarlais
I introduce this justification by discussing a concrete example, involving
the case of an aboriginal child named Lester Desjarlais. In 1992, at the
age of 13, Desjarlais committed suicide at the Sandy Bay Ojibway
Reserve in Manitoba, after a history of sexual and physical abuse at the
hands of a series of foster parents. In the aftermath of this incident,
aboriginal feminist groups strongly and successfully advocated federal
government intervention into the administration of aboriginal child
welfare agencies, who had mishandled the Desjarlais case and others
like it. These women were concerned that Ojibway political leaders had
conspired with members of the Manitoba provincial government to
keep the matter secret and hence exempt from public scrutiny. They
also charged that male aboriginal leaders had attempted to silence
aboriginal feminists who had initiated the inquiry.33 The report arising
from the hearings over the case—known as the Giesbrecht Report after
the judge who headed the inquiry—supported the feminist aboriginal
groups by recommending that the federal government impose strong
disciplinary measures against provincial government officials, as well
as impose strong restrictions on the authority of aboriginal controlled
child welfare.34 Following the report, the leader of the Aboriginal
Women's Unity Coalition strongly praised the judge's report and
actions, while expressing reservations at the report's recommendation
that aboriginals should be excluded from membership in child welfare
agencies altogether.35 Ojibway leaders who disagreed with the report's
findings reacted quite differently by warning the provincial government
“not to curtail the powers of aboriginal child welfare agencies”, on the
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grounds that “Those days of having governments impose their
will on First Nations are over.”36
This question presents a case in which the practices of a minority
nation clearly violate liberal principles.37 However, it does not
automatically follow that federal governments are justified in coercively
imposing liberal principles.38 In Multicultural Citizenship, Kymlicka
argues that intervention is justified only rarely, in cases of “gross and
systematic violation of human rights, such as slavery or genocide or
mass torture and expulsions.”39 This exacting standard would probably
prohibit federal intervention in cases like that of Lester Desjarlais since
the injustices at stake in that case cannot reasonably be interpreted as
gross and systematic violations at the same level as slavery, genocide,
or ethnic cleansing. However, Kymlicka provides no independent
arguments to justify this standard for federal intervention in the affairs
of minority national groups and, in any case, this standard seems
arbitrary. Injustices can be gross and systematic violations of human
rights even if they are less severe than those involved in slavery and
genocide. Furthermore, liberal citizens have strong reasons to support
intervention in the affairs of the minority nation in cases like that of
Lester Desjarlais. First, even if most adults in the minority nation
express a preference for living in a fully autonomous, self-governing,
but pervasively abusive national culture, it hardly follows that they
should be allowed to force children, who have had no say in what their
national identity is or should be, to live in such a culture. Importantly,
the individual rights most severely violated here are those of children
and particularly their right to individual autonomy and their right to
exit the group. Furthermore, there is no question of whether or not
children's rights are being violated here since nothing violates a
person's rights so much as the fact of being driven to suicide by
pervasive abuse. Second, it is important to note that in this case some
adult members of the minority nation objected so strongly to their
government's countenance of pervasive child abuse that they initiated
the call for federal intervention. The case for federal intervention in the
affairs of a minority national group is surely especially strong when
internal dissidents from the minority group in question demand it, when
the injustice in question is a clear and grievous one, and when the
victims are children.
Cases like that of Lester Desjarlais cannot safely be ignored by civic
education in multination states. In order to see why, it is worth taking a
closer look at what sort of dispositions are required in order for
members of minority nations to seek assistance from the federal
government in order to rectify injustices that cannot be
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addressed within the group itself. First of all, they can do so only if they
have developed dispositions and capacities that enable them to
recognize their minority national identities as at least partially
contingent and conditional. However, some forms of nationalist
education will seek to forge a strong loyalty to the minority nation that
forestalls the development of such dispositions and capacities. Indeed,
this is perhaps particularly likely within minority nations given their
history of colonization and oppression. As David Miller notes, in
colonial contexts, it “was not absurd for people to expect that they
would have a greater sense of control over their destinies when ruled
by local oligarchies than when ruled by imperial powers, even if in
many cases these expectations have been frustrated.”40
Suppose a minority national group, given its history of colonization by
the majority federal nation, seeks to foster an unconditional national
loyalty such that individual members come to see federal intervention
as necessarily oppressive and hence never justified. The result of such
an education, if it is successful, is not just that individual members will
be prevented from seeking outside assistance when conditions within
the nation become intolerable. It will also severely limit the capacity of
individuals to exercise their right to exit the nation. Not all minority
national groups will foster, or attempt to foster, such an absolute sense
of allegiance, and to this extent members of the nation may develop a
sufficiently contingent sense of their loyalty to the nation to meet the
requirements of citizenship at the federal level. But when minority
nations do foster a strong sense of national loyalty, there is a strong
prima facie case for civic education at the federal level to claim a
substantial role in developing at least a conditional national allegiance.
In any case, if civic education in multination states cannot or does not
play such a role, then the conditions under which the federal state is
clearly justified in intervening in minority national affairs on behalf of
members of the minority group cannot be enforced. When this happens,
members of minority national groups, especially children, will be
deprived of the sort of education that enables them to seek outside
assistance, or to exercise their right to exit, when they are treated
unjustly within the group.
At least as importantly, the Desjarlais case helps to illuminate an
important role for multinational civic education for citizens of the
majority federal nation. A distressing feature of the Desjarlais case is
the apparent lethargy and reluctance of provincial politicians in
reacting to the pervasive child abuse within the Ojibway culture. There
is no way to determine the precise reasons for this reluctance in
this case. However, the mere fact that it occurred raises the question of
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what sort of education is required in order to enable and favorably
dispose citizens of the majority federal nation to support and enforce
principles of justice when the need arises to support oppressed
individuals and groups within minority nations. Clearly, a conception of
civic education that fosters an understanding of, and appreciation for,
liberal norms is part of what is needed, but it is also far from sufficient.
Citizens also need to be taught how such norms should be applied in
particular cases. However, in cases of national conflict, there is a great
deal of indeterminacy in the application of liberal principles to
particular cases. Part of the reason for this is that in multination states
there is usually no stable and entrenched tradition of mutual trust and
democratic cooperation involving the treatment of issues of justice
across national boundaries. The lack of trust and cooperation on the
part of members of previously colonized minority nations is perhaps
more often recognized than the absence of trust on the part of
members of the majority nation. If boundaries of minority national
loyalties are perceived as invioble and absolute, then members of the
majority nation will be accordingly reluctant to intervene when
injustices occur within minority national groups. To the extent that
citizens of the federal nation are educated to see the borders between
majority and minority nations as vioble only on pain of oppression, they
will be disinclined to develop the sort of national solidarity that might
serve justice when it is needed. Attempts to offer help or to answer
pleas for assistance from members of minority nations may be avoided
not because of callousness or disregard, but because there it will be
difficult for well meaning citizens to imagine their possible acts of
intervention as potentially aiding justice for members of minority
national groups, rather than as necessarily dominating and repressing
them.
It might be objected that the argument I have advanced provides no
educational justification for promoting something so strong as a shared
national identity at the federal level. So long as citizens of multination
states develop a federal disposition, they will share adequate moral
resources for upholding principles of justice when circumstances
require it. However, this distinction between disposition and identity
strikes me as a false one in this context. In particular, it strikes me as
psychologically implausible in the context of multination states. Part of
the reason has to do with the particular nature of political relations
between minority and majority nations in multination states like
Canada. Individual members of historically oppressed and colonized
minority national groups may reasonably evince suspicion and
distrust of federal institutions and the liberal principles they support.
Nevertheless, these same institutions may be their only recourse when
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the institutions of the minority nation violate values and liberties they
cherish. Here, obviously, I have in mind individuals such as the children
and women in the Desjarlais case. In such cases, it is not clear how
individuals can develop a reliable and stable federal disposition under
these circumstances, given the powerful current of distrust and
suspicion that characterizes political relations in multination states.
Such feelings hinder the disposition to appeal for justice at the federal
level, and they also powerfully inhibit members of the majority federal
nation from offering help. In this case, cultivating a shared federal
identity, conditional though it may be, will help to offset or reduce the
force of such inhibitions that arise from mutual suspicion and distrust,
even if it cannot or should not completely eliminate them. It will do so
by seeking to foster a conditional but sufficiently strong affective
attachment to the federal nation, such that one can feel that, when
necessary, one is welcome to seek assistance when justice requires it.
In this way, multinational civic education's role is to seek ways to build
traditions that moderate the sense of mutual distrust that currently
characterizes relations in many multination states, and that seek to
develop an overlapping federal national narrative, in which members of
minority nations can come to see themselves as having a voice in
reshaping the existing federal liberal identity, and that their voice is
welcome within the context of federal politics.
13.3. Accommodating Illiberal Minority Nationalism
When nationalists demand the right to self-determination they often
have in mind complete autonomy and self-government, and as a result
they reject any role for the federal government in matters having to do
with educating members of the nation. From this perspective, the
conditionalist view of multinational civic education will seem
preposterous because there is no way multinational civic education can
pretend to give minority nationalists everything they want, given the
commitment to promoting a shared federal–civic identity based on
solidarity, mutual respect, and democratic cooperation. However, in
addressing the question of accommodating the right to minority
national self-determination, it is important to ask not just what minority
nationalists demand of the federal state. We also need to ask under
what circumstances and on what grounds, if any, the state is
legitimately entitled to circumscribe the scope of this right. If
the best answer to this question favors an approach to multinational
civic education that accommodates the demands of minority
nationalists for unrestricted control over nationalist education, it will be
devastating to the conditionalist argument. However, I shall argue that
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the best answer in fact supports a more restrictive and conditional form
of accommodation for minority national groups.
One way of approaching the issue of liberal accommodations for
illiberal minority national groups is by examining the notion of cultural
respect that citizens owe each other in multination states. An initial
argument for cultural respect says that it makes sense to respect the
dominant culture of a nation, and not dissenters from it. After all, the
whole point of being a dissenter is to put oneself overtly against the
popular culture of one's group, and so it is foolish to show respect for a
culture by privileging dissenters from it.41 This is an admittedly fast
and loose argument for cultural respect, but it is as good a place to
start as any because it nicely captures the sort of strong
accommodations members of many minority nations demand. It is also
supported by arguments offered by some liberals in support of strong
accommodations for minority national groups. For example, Yael Tamir
argues that a liberal society should “place at its core a commitment to
equal concern and respect for individuals, their preferences and
interests … regardless of whether these were formed autonomously or
were forced upon individuals by their culture or tradition.”42 According
to Tamir, liberals should be “constantly ready to make efforts to allow
members of [illiberal] cultures to retain their ways of life”, even if this
means enabling those groups to make sure that children in the culture
are educated in ways that deny them the conditions for personal
autonomy.43 Similarly, Chandran Kukathas argues that the liberal
principle of freedom of association guarantees “the wider society has
no right to require particular standards or systems of education within
such [illiberal] cultural groups.”44 If the prevailing culture of a minority
nation rejects any form of civic education that educates for civic
solidarity at the federal level, and if minority nationalist education
attempts to stifle or minimize political dissent by depriving children of
the conditions for personal autonomy, or by failing to educate some of
its members altogether, then cultural respect requires that the liberal
state accommodate these demands, or so this liberal line of argument
suggests.
The strong accommodationist position can be and is challenged on a
number of grounds from a liberal point of view. For example,
Kymlicka argues that liberal conceptions of tolerance and freedom of
association are shot through with commitments to personal
autonomy,45 and so these principles cannot be employed to justify
accommodation of illiberal groups that prevent children from
developing a capacity for personal autonomy.46 In a similar vein, others
have argued that strong accommodationist arguments betray the very
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principle of freedom of association that is supposed to guarantee
accommodation to illiberal groups, because those groups fail to provide
the conditions for a substantial right of exit from the group by denying
the conditions of personal autonomy to children and other group
members.47 I think these objections are devastating to the
accommodationist position. However, they do not address what is
distinctive about accommodating minority national groups as opposed
to other minority ethnic, religious, or cultural groups. Rather than
pursue these objections further, I want to develop a different but
related objection, namely that the strong accommodationist argument
turns on a morally dubious interpretation of cultural respect. In
particular, I shall argue that it provides a strikingly distorted and
morally corrupt foundation for the civic virtue of cultural respect, and
hence for civic education, in multination states.
Cultural Respect
Imagine, first, what is involved in showing respect for another. Bernard
Williams has said that respect involves an “effort at identificat- ion”
that we owe other people. According to Williams, in making this effort,
another person “should not be regarded as the surface to which a
certain label can be applied, but one should try to see the world
(including the label) from his point of view.”48 We can plaus-ibly assume
that most members of minority national groups have a self-
understanding that is deeply rooted in a sense of loyalty and affiliation
with their own particular nation. For example, they will see themselves
primarily as Quebecers or Cree or Ojibway. These labels matter for
many people, but at a deeper level of self-understanding they do not
necessarily matter to everyone in the same way. In general, some
individuals will express their national identity through loyalty to the
dominant culture of the nation, while others will express their identity
by dissenting from the dominant culture. What is important here is that
in asking what is involved in cultural respect, we need to ask not just
how respect can be given to individuals as members of national
cultures, but how respect can be given to individuals who cherish their
national identities in different and sometimes divergent ways.
The example of the American abolitionist movement is
instructive here. Abolitionists argued that American principles of
freedom and equality actually oppose the dominant cultural practice of
slavery. In doing so, they were explicitly setting themselves against the
racially exclusive popular culture, and arguably the national culture, of
America in the early 1800s, since slavery was not banned even in all the
northeastern states until the first or second decade of the nineteenth
century. Abolitionists were engaged in a civic national debate that
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aimed to transform the prevailing culture so that it could become more
closely aligned with, and supportive of, what they took to be the
nation's fundamental political principles.49 Abolitionists defied the
dominant interpretations of the nation's civic principles, and expressed
a national identity that challenged the prevailing national identity.
However, they did so not by rejecting their national identity or by
exiting the national culture. They did so by participating in the civic
culture of the nation, and by supporting unorthodox interpretations of
the nation's civic principles.
Now, imagine how a nineteenth century abolitionist in the United States
might have responded to a Canadian who purported to show his respect
by saying: “As a Canadian, I deplore the practice of slavery as a
grievous violation of the principles of freedom and equality that your
nation stands for. However, I am also obliged to respect you as a
member of your prevailing national culture, which supports slavery.” It
is hard to see how most abolitionists could, upon reflec-tion, see this as
anything but a baffling expression of ignorant contempt. Eamonn
Callan points out that contempt “does not always take the shape of
hostility or even explicit disagreement; it can be registered in the
smiling faces of those who find us perfectly agreeable but cannot or will
not take seriously our own self-understanding.”50 At the very least, the
expression of “respect” by my fanciful example of the Canadian
certainly fails to take seriously the self-understanding of most US
abolitionists, who saw themselves as American patriots, but detested
the dominant culture's endorsement of slavery. Nor is the imaginary
Canadian's attempt to show respect likely to do justice to the self-
understanding of many non-abolitionist Americans who saw themselves
as patriots engaged in a debate about the future of the nation. The
same point applies to expressions of cultural respect between members
of majority and minority national groups in multination states. It makes
little sense to say that Canadian citizens show due respect to aboriginal
feminists, such as those in the Desjarlais case, by treating them as if
their identity depended upon the prevailing culture of the nation. To do
so would be to treat them as if attitudes of approbation, or at
least lenience, toward child abuse were central to their national
identity when in fact their self-understanding of the national identity
makes central the condemnation of such attitudes. In this light,
expressions of “cultural respect” that recognize only the dominant
culture of a nation quickly and perhaps subtly mutate into expressions
of condescension by outsiders who sanguinely accept one-dimensional
caricatures of another national culture.
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Jeremy Waldron has pointed out the dangers of treating people as
“mere artifacts of the culture … to which we think they ought to
belong.”51 Given the fact that different individuals understand the
meaning of their national culture and identity in radically different and
conflicting ways, when we respect only the prevailing or dominant
interpretations of the national identity we are treating them as “mere
artifacts” of the culture, and not as individuals who have the right to
voice for themselves what it means to be a member of the nation. It is
foolish to say that respect involves treating another nation according to
some caricaturized version of it that we outsiders have constructed or
accepted, perhaps unduly influenced by the dominant representations
of the culture. In short, a liberal state cannot adequately show respect
for another nation just by asking about the prevailing culture of a
minority national group. It also needs to ask what it might mean to
respect individual members of the nation.
The distinction between cultural respect for the prevailing culture, on
the one hand, and cultural respect for individuals depends on
circumstances of moral pluralism, political dissent, and disagreement
that do not apply when members of a nation share a robust and tightly
defined cultural identity. Furthermore, the accommodationist argues
that it is precisely when a tightly defined cultural identity exists that
cultural respect requires respect for the prevailing culture of the
nation. When members of a group, or at least members of the group
who have reached the age of moral maturity, share such an identity, the
identities of individuals are likely to closely coincide with the prevailing
culture of the group, and so the distinction I have drawn may therefore
seem fatuous from the accommodationist point of view. However, even
under favorable conditions, minority groups are likely to have a difficult
time promoting this sort of snug fit between individual and group
identities, and minority national groups face particular difficulties in
this respect. More importantly, I shall argue, there are particular
considerations having to do with the right to national self-determination
that vigorously mitigate the limited moral force of cultural
respect for the prevailing culture of minority national groups. Thus, I
shall argue that we are especially apt to be badly misled about what
cultural respect entails in discussions of multinational citizenship if we
confuse different versions of cultural respect.
Underwriting this argument is an appreciation of the normative
relationship between the right to national self-determination and the
democratic and deliberative function of the civic dimension of national
cultures. David Miller notes that national identities, including minority
national identities, are importantly shaped through “a complicated
(p.374)
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picture in which the ambitions and interests of particular subgroups
jostle with cultural beliefs and values to create identities that are
always impure when measured against the hypothetical standard of a
group of people sitting down together to think out what it means to
them to be Jewish or black.”52 Furthermore, national identities, in
contrast for example to minority ethnic identities, are influenced in a
particularly intense way by this element of impurity in the civic national
culture because “they are shaped more deliberately by political
discussion in the course of which, in democratic states, each smaller
group can make its voice heard.”53 Thus, as Miller says, “the historical
association between ideas of democracy and ideas of national self-
determination is hardly accidental: only a democratic state can ensure
that the self-determination we are talking about is genuinely national,
as opposed to the self-determination of a class or governing clique.”54
This will seem like a patently romanticized description of the politics of
minority national self-determination in actual multination states.
Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that the purpose of
drawing attention to the connection between democratic deliberation
and national self-determination is not to illustrate the conditions of civic
debate within actual minority national groups, but rather to clarify the
normative grounds for the sort of cultural respect that is owed by
members of the wider multination state to members of minority
national cultures.
In order to see this more clearly, consider the fact that the democratic
function of the national civic culture is often imperfectly realized in
actual national groups. In some cases, democratic civic debate can be
degraded when the prevailing culture of the nation is pervasively
illiberal. When we view cultural respect as respect for democratic
national self-determination, the putative fact that a minority nation's
prevailing illiberal culture undermines the deliberative and democratic
function of the national civic culture provides no support for a view of
cultural respect that privileges the prevailing culture of the nation.
Sharply to the contrary, a view of cultural respect that licenses
the prevailing national culture clearly and powerfully threatens to
undermine the nation's right to self-determination, by supporting
conditions under which political and economic elites can potentially
deprive the wider national population of any significant influence over
national political debate.
Accuracy demands that we acknowledge the fact that cultural respect
as respect for the right to national self-determination does not strictly
require recognizing the democratic dimension of minority national
cultures. It is at least conceivable, as Miller points out, that there are
(p.375)
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cases in which “there is indeed a genuine convergence in the aims and
interests between the population at large and those making decisions
on their behalf”, the nation's interest in self-determination can be
satisfied by non-democratic forms of governance.55 In this case, the
minority nation will be equivalent to a purely “ethnic nation” since the
dominant interpretations of the national identity will be endorsed or at
least accepted by all individual members of the nation. As such, it will
be impossible to distinguish the civic national culture from the
prevailing culture of the nation. All members of the nation will agree
upon, or at least voluntarily consent to, a single dominant
interpretation of the national culture. Perhaps the best a liberal state
can do in such cases is as the accommodationist recommends, which is
to educate citizens to show respect for other cultures by acknowledging
the prevailing culture, subject to constraints having to do with cruelty,
slavery, etc.
However, minority national groups rarely fit neatly into this picture of
complete cultural homogeneity and political consensus. If respect for
actual minority national groups is adequately attuned to a minority
national culture's right to national self-determination, in most
circumstances citizens must appreciate the national culture as a civic
culture of democratic deliberation and disagreement about the political
future of the nation and its identity. The notion of cultural respect for
the right to national self-determination therefore encourages us to
imagine citizens of minority national groups in a particular way, as
citizens who share a civic space and national identity even when
interpretations of what that identity means differs markedly among
individual citizens. I now want to explore in more detail what civic
education for cultural respect in multination states entails when set
against this moral-cum-political background.
Multinational Civic Education, Accommodation, and Distrust
It is perhaps easiest to begin to develop this point by examining what
multinational civic education entails for members of the majority
federal multination state. Consider the attitudes that
underwrite sentiments that members of the majority nation sometimes
express when they say that the demands of minority national groups
express a disdain for, or somehow humiliate, citizens of the majority
nation. This is the point of the comment, quoted much earlier in this
chapter, that Quebec's claim to be a distinct society implies that “the
rest of us” (i.e. Canadians) are “so much chopped liver.” If multinational
civic education is to be capable of making headway in cementing an
affirmative understanding of the minority right to national self-
(p.376)
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determination, it must certainly be able to address this sense of
distrust.
Even sophisticated liberals like Kymlicka, who are keenly attuned to the
politics of multination states, do not always see quite clearly enough
what the moral and psychological basis for such attitudes might be.
Kymlicka argues that, in Canada, members of the majority nation
assume the right to national self-determination and self- government for
themselves even as they deny such rights to members of minority
national groups. The only way they can overlook this contradiction, he
says, is by wrongly assuming that members of minority nations are
“really” Canadians first and foremost, and not Québécois or aboriginal
or Inuit. Thus, members of the majority nation need to appreciate the
fact that members of minority national groups see their primary
national identity as Québécois, aboriginal, or Inuit. Once citizens
recognize this, and once they see that maintaining a national identity
requires significant measures of self- government and educational
policies that teach citizens to affirm the nation and its institutions, they
will be able to see the ethnocentrism that underpins their rejection of
rights to minority national self-determination. Recognizing this right is
not a matter of complying with demands for privileged status by some
citizens over others. Rather, it is a matter of granting the same rights of
national self- government to members of all the constituent national
groups that share a multination state. Once citizens appreciate the
importance of the fact that members of minority national groups are
the same as those of majority national groups in the relevant sense that
they are members of different national groups, they should be able to
recognize that accommodating minority nationalist demands for
national self-determination “does not involve any disrespect or
invidious discrimination.”55 Rather, civic education should teach that
such accommodations are sometimes necessary in order to rectify and
eliminate discriminatory policies that accord the right to national self-
determination for one group (Canadians) but deny it to others.
According to this analysis, the linchpin of multinational civic education
should be the aim of fostering a greater appreciation for
national diversity within the multination state. For example, children
will need to learn to identify and appreciate the value and meaning of
having a national identity, both for themselves and others. They will
also need to grasp the ways in which sustaining a national identity
depends on self-government, and how national identities differ from
immigrant–ethnic identities in this respect. Understanding these ideas
is important because such understanding is a precondition for
superseding discriminatory attitudes and for creating dispositions and
(p.377)
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capacities of cultural respect for minority national rights in multination
states.
This account strikes me as important and valuable. However, I think a
better and more complete account of the kind of cultural respect that
multinational civic education needs to foster needs to tell a somewhat
more complex story about the sort of civic distrust to which minority
nationalist demands often give rise. I have in mind an account of civic
distrust that begins from the point of view that the demand for minority
national self-determination looks like a self-indulgent demand to have
one's cake and eat it too. The demand for minority self-government
siphons the resources of the federal nation, both in terms of financial as
well as social capital, for example, by relying on the sacrifices that non-
aboriginal Canadians make when tax money is distributed by the
federal government to pay for minority self-government. However,
members of minority national groups are unwilling to repay these
sacrifices by showing their allegiance and doing their fair share as
Canadians first. Instead, they respond by relegating their identity as
Canadians to inferior status, or by seeking to disown their affiliation
with Canada altogether. Thus, from the perspective of many Canadians,
the demand for minority national self-government is not merely a
demand that treats some citizens more equally than others; it is a
demand that seeks privileges for those who disdain their citizenship in
the nation, and who wish to use the resources of the nation to create
conditions by which they can reject their citizenship as soon as
possible. Given this assessment of minority national demands, it is not
surprising that some members of the majority nation express feelings of
humiliation and resentment when such demands are made.
There is much that is wrong-headed with this story. For example, it
ignores the historical debts that Canadians may owe to members of
minority national groups as the result of past oppression and
discrimination. It also ignores the fact that strong and securely
autonomous minority national groups may make numerous and
valuable contributions to the multination state. Federal support for
measures that strengthen aboriginal education and health care, for
example, contribute to a stronger and more just Canada as well as to a
stronger minority national identity. It also ignores the fact that
citizenship in the multination state has both benefits and costs for
members of minority national groups that are not borne by members of
the majority nation. For example, members of minority national groups
inevitably give up a significant measure of political autonomy and self-
government that members of the majority nation take for granted. To
the extent that civic education can foster a greater appreciation for the
(p.378)
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benefits that national diversity may have for the larger multination
state, and for the burdens that members of minority nations bear by
virtue of their membership in the multination state, it may be able to
diminish the force of some of the distrustful attitudes Canadians
express when minority national groups demand special powers of self-
government. However, fostering an appreciation for such points cannot
be achieved simply by fostering an appreciation for national diversity
within the multination state. Ultimately, it must address the ways in
which Canadian attitudes of distrust and discrimination toward
minority nationalists often arise from the deeply entrenched idea that
citizenship in the federal nation is an all or nothing affair.
To many Canadians, the demand for minority self-government seems, at
best, to reflect a half-hearted commitment to Canada, and, at worst, a
purely instrumental and self-interested use of the Canadian state as a
prelude to abandonment and secession. Of course, sometimes this is
true and it is important to recognize this point. However, it is also
important to recognize that when Canadian citizenship is presented as
an all or nothing affair, the accommodations offered to minority
national groups also appear halfhearted and appear to be, and often in
fact have been, instruments of policy that aim to gradually assimilate
members of minority national groups into the larger nation. In order to
address attitudes of mutual civic distrust that emerge in this context,
multinational civic education needs to foster an appreciation on the
part of members of the majority nation for the conditional and partial
nature of majority and minority national civic allegiances. It needs,
therefore, to teach that it is possible for citizens who feel a strong and
primary attachment to a minority national group need not thereby
demean their attachment to the majority multination state. It also needs
to foster an appreciation for the sacrifices as well as the benefits that
membership in the multination state entails for members of minority
national groups. Such an approach to multinational civic
education thus addresses feelings of mutual distrust and suspicion by
fostering a larger and more encompassing sense of multinational
citizenship, which incorporates a greater sympathetic understanding of
the conditional nature of both majority and minority national
affiliations.
(p.379)
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13.4. Conclusion: From Principle to Practice
So far I have justified a conditionalist conception of multinational civic
education by illuminating the ways in which such an education might
help to promote justice, political stability, and transnational respect.
However, I have largely ignored daunting problems having to do with
the feasibility of such an approach. The most obvious and important
practical problems, I think, have to do with institutional design and
structure. A system of common schools that houses children from a
variety of national backgrounds provides the most obvious vehicle for
the kind of conditional shared federal identity I have been defending,
and for promoting attitudes and dispositions of transnational respect.
However, it is often unfeasible and sometimes morally undesirable to
develop such a system of common schools in any comprehensive way
for reasons other than concerns about national identity. Part of the
problem is practical. Some minority national groups are territorially
concentrated in remote areas (e.g. the Inuit), and thus the possibilities
for genuinely common schools are slim. But these difficulties do not
always arise. In some cases, children from aboriginal groups live in
close enough proximity to other Canadian children that common
schooling is a possibility. However, in these cases discriminatory and
racist attitudes may be an obstacle. Members of aboriginal groups may
welcome children from all backgrounds into existing aboriginal schools,
but find themselves rebuffed by their white neighbors.56 Here the
liberal state might play a role in helping to create conditions whereby
common schools become a more attractive option for non-aboriginal
citizens, for example, by providing funding for extra programs or
resources. Also, Québécois schools restrict school access according to
language, and hence in this way and others attempt to foster an
attitude of partiality toward Quebec. However, French schools in
Quebec do not exclude on the basis of ethnicity, race, etc. Common
schools in Quebec are multicultural and pluralistic. Furthermore, many
children from immigrant families attend French speaking schools and
members of these groups are likely to have and retain affirmative
attitudes toward Canada. The same is true for children of many
anglophone parents who attend French schools. Thus, overall, while
Quebec's system of common schools may do little to promote a shared
identification with the larger multination state, they may do little to
impede or destroy that identity either.
Aside from these practical difficulties, there are other, moral
considerations that need to be considered in implementing a program
of multinational civic education. First, common schools and a common
education for a shared loyalty to the multination state may impede or
weaken minority national loyalties and thus undermine the conditions
(p.380)
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for national self-determination. This may happen not because children
receive an education that enables them freely to choose their culture on
the basis of reason and reflection. Rather, it may happen simply
because in a common school context the culture of the federal nation,
or the mass global culture that has overtaken it, will overpower
minority national affiliations. As such, minority national groups have
good reason to worry that when young children from the group attend
common schools, their national identity will be undermined even before
it has been achieved. In these cases it might be possible to address
such concerns through a system of separate schools that focus on
establishing a commitment to the minority nation in the early years of
schooling. After this, children from the minority nation may attend
common schools with children from other backgrounds.57
Here difficulties arise because national self-determination is closely
connected to self-government, including control over schooling. In
federal multination states like Canada, powers of educational govern-
ance are completely decentralized so that each province controls its
own schools and has its own standards for curriculum, teacher training,
etc. Most of these provincially controlled education systems are not
engaged in projects of provincial self-determination or in promoting a
separate provincial identity. Thus, the civic and moral educational
project of these schools is not inherently in tension with the project of
promoting a shared federal identity. The same is not obviously true of
most minority national systems of education that do seek to foster a
national identity different from, and potentially in conflict with, the
federal nation. Minority national groups are not likely, especially under
the sort of conditions of mutual distrust I have discussed, to voluntarily
adopt the aims of multinational civic education. Nor can the federal
state impose such a project without risking undermining the nation's
right to self-determination.
Overall, the prospects for a system of common schooling that might
serve as the vehicle for multinational civic education seem dim
under present circumstances. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the
multinational civic educational project is hopeless or pointless. Most
importantly, if members of the majority nation are educated in ways
that foster forms of cultural respect that are more attuned to the rights
of national minority groups, and to the benefits and burdens of
multinational citizenship, then attitudes of distrust and suspicion that
currently beset political relations in multination states might be
moderated; and eventually new and morally more desirable attitudes
and dispositions might be able to fill in the gaps.
(p.381)
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The difficulties here are daunting, and I do not want to underestim-ate
them. Nevertheless, I want to end by pointing out one small reason for
hope. The commonly held assumption that minority nations are
inherently ethnic nations obscures one of the reasons that multinational
civic education's aim of promoting a shared federal identity is not
completely hopeless. The most serious and potentially damaging
feature of this assumption is that it makes it necessary to ignore the
fact that, in many cases, members of minority national groups already
participate to a significant extent in the Western liberal institutions,
and traditions of the federal civic nation. Aboriginal and Québécois
politicians are elected to the Canadian Parliament, are appointed as
judges, etc. And, importantly, members of minority national groups
sometimes appeal for justice to Canadian legal institutions when
oppression cannot be addressed within the nation. The interactions
between members of majority and minority national groups in politics,
law, and civil society may not offer the same sort of educational
crucible that a well functioning system of common schools might. But
these are educational contexts nonetheless. If such relations are
characterized by mutual respect and a concern for justice, then those
values may have a better opportunity of taking root and growing into
something broader and more pervasive. Such a result might be too
much to hope for. However, the likelihood of this result would be
increased if multinational civic education were competently
implemented in common schools that serve members of the majority
nation.
Multinational civic education, understood in this light, is obviously a
long-term project fraught with risk and the possibility of failure. Its
success must be hoped and fought for if we are to have a chance of
creating just and stable multination states. However, it must also be
fought for even if it is ultimately doomed to fail. The failure of
multinational civic education may be ultimately substantiated by the
secession of minority national groups. Nevertheless, the prospect of
secession does not obviate the need for creating and sustaining
virtues of transnational respect and solidarity for justice. Ultimately, a
genuine commitment to multinational civic education now may be an
important way of laying the groundwork for international peace and
democratic cooperation in the future.
NOTES
Notes:
(p.382)
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(1.) Jeremy Webber, Reimagining Canada: Language, Community and
the Canadian Constitution (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press,
1994), 7.
(2.) Webber, Reimagining Canada, 199.
(3.) E. Brian Titley, A Narrow Vision: Duncan Campbell Scott and the
Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada (Montreal: McGill University
Press, 1986), 78.
(4.) Ibid., 78.
(5.) Blacker's point in Chapter 9 of this volume is salient here: liberal
democracy cannot by itself provide the motivational roots needed to
secure its own success. For Blacker, the needed roots are to be found in
the particular comprehensive conceptions of the good life citizens
endorse. But liberal instrumentalists follow a different path, seeking
these roots at least partly in a shared national identity.
(6.) David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 194.
(7.) Ibid., 195.
(8.) Ibid., 184; see also Michael Sandel, Democracy's Discontent:
America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996).
(9.) Will Kymlicka, “Liberal Egalitarianism and Civic Republicanism:
Friends or Enemies?” in Anita L. Allen and Milton C. Regan, Jr (eds),
Debating Democracy's Discontent (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998), 141.
(10.) Miller, On Nationality. Richard Dagger, Civic Virtues: Rights,
Citizenship and Republican Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997).
(11.) Dagger.
(12.) Miller, 189. I take it he has in mind something like John Rawls's
idea of a political community as a morality of association.
(13.) Miller, 195.
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(14.) A further, noteworthy advantage of the liberal-instrumentalist
justification is that it addresses Ken Strike's concerns about the
dangers of “identity talk” in Chapter 3 of this volume. Strike's main
concern is that liberal scholars often employ “identity talk” in a way
that leads to a (perhaps unintentional) emphasis on communitarian
concerns about group solidarity and unity, and that obscures the
importance of liberal principles of justice. This emphasis is importantly
misleading because a shared identity is oriented to a different sort of
thing than are liberal principles like freedom of conscience. One seeks
to reinforce a sense of one's “essential identity” with and loyalty to a
particular group of people while the other protects individuals and their
groups from threats to their being able to live according to their most
cherished convictions. The liberal-instrumentalist justification, however,
justifies shared identities precisely because a sense of shared
membership to the nation is needed to support liberal principles of
justice. In contrast, republican–intrinsic justifications for promoting
shared civic identities obscure the role that national loyalty plays in
protecting these values, and therefore make it difficult to understand
some crucially important reasons why having a shared civic identity is
worthwhile. Thus, liberal principles such as freedom of association,
freedom of conscience, and freedom of speech have a point that is not
easily captured by talk of the intrinsic identities, but is fully and richly
captured by talk of instrumental identities.
(15.) Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism,
Multiculturalism and Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001), 140–1. Here Kymlicka cites Michael Ignatieff's Blood and
Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar,
Strauss and Giroux, 1993), William Pfaff, The Wrath of Nations:
Civilization and the Furies of Nationalism (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1993).
(16.) Stephen Macedo, Democracy and Distrust: Civic Education in a
Multicultural Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000),
179.
(17.) Miller, On Nationality, 87.
(18.) See Joseph Dunne's discussion of this point in Chapter 5 of this
volume.
(19.) Miller, On Nationality, 87
(20.) Ibid., 88.
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(21.) Something like this view seems to underlie recent analyses of
nationalism by Ignatieff, in Blood and Belonging, Pfaff, The Wrath of
Nations, and David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond
Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995). Ignatieff, for example,
laments the fact that minority national groups “are often more loyal to
the ethnic units that compose them than to the federation and the laws
that hold the state together,” 243.
(22.) Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular, 242–8.
(23.) See, for example, Esther Delisle, The Traitor and the Jew: Anti-
Semitism and the Delirium of Extremist Right-Wing Nationalism in
French Canada from 1929–1939 (Montreal-Toronto: Robert Davies
Publishing, 1993). See also the interesting documentary film, Je Me
Souviens, Eric Scott, Productions Quatre Jeudis.
(24.) Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular, 131.
(25.) Ibid., 74–7.
(26.) See, for example, Avigail Eisenberg, “Individualism and
Collectivism in the Politics of Canada's North” in Joan Anderson, Avigail
Eisenberg, Sherril Grace, and Veronica Strong-Boag (eds), Painting the
Maple: Essays on Race, Gender and the Construction of Canada
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1998).
(27.) Ignatieff now acknowledges this point when he concedes that “no
nation is ever only ethnic or civic in the principles of its cohesion.” See
Ignatieff, The Rights Revolution (Toronto: Anansi Press, 2000), 128.
(28.) See Jeremy Waldron's discussion in Chapter 1 of this volume.
(29.) Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular, 126.
(30.) Ibid., 246.
(31.) Ibid., 230–2.
(32.) Ibid., 248.
(33.) Ruth Telchroab, “Native Women, Glover Feel Vindicated: ‘The
Judge Saw the Truth and Had the Courage to Tackle it’ “, Winnipeg
Free Press, (5 Sep.) A10. The opposition of aboriginal leaders to the
aboriginal feminists is evident in this passage from a newspaper story
on the tragedy, which describes the leaders’ reaction to Sandy Glover, a
native child care worker who first publicly exposed the tragedy: “Glover
… was the target of repeated attacks by DOCFS officials during the
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inquest. They were angry at her because she had publicly complained
that political interference had hampered child abuse investigations at
the Sandy Bay Reserve.”
(34.) Ruth Telchroab, “Province Warned Off Native Turf: Fontaine Takes
Exception as Judge Urges Tighter Reign on Care Agency”, Winnipeg
Free Press, (5 Sep. 1992), A1.
(35.) Telchroab, “Native Women, Glover Feel Vindicated”, Winnipeg
Free Press, (5 Sep. 1992) A10.
(36.) Ibid.
(37.) I do not mean to suggest that children's rights to freedom from
sexual and physical abuse can be derived only from liberal principles.
Obviously, they can be derived from a wide range of decent political
principles, of which liberal principles are only one set. However, here I
stress the distinctive reasons that liberals might have for supporting
interventionists measures.
(38.) Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995), 165.
(39.) Ibid., 18.
(40.) Miller, On Nationality, 90.
(41.) Meira Levinson helpfully articulated this argument in her
comments on a previous draft of this chapter.
(42.) Yael Tamir, “Two Concepts of Multiculturalism” in The Journal of
Philosophy of Education, (1995), 168.
(43.) Ibid., 167.
(44.) Chandran Kukathas, “Are There any Cultural Rights?” Political
Theory, 20: (1), 117.
(45.) Kymlicka argues that tolerance and autonomy are “two sides of
the same coin.” See Multicultural Citizenship, 155–8.
(46.) See, for example, the essays by Susan Okin and Rob Reich in this
volume (Chapters 11 and 12, respectively).
(47.) Williams, cited in Callan “Discrimination and Religious Schooling”
in Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman (eds), Citizenship in Diverse
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Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 60. My discussion of
cultural respect is indebted to Callan's discussion in Ibid., 58–63.
(48.) I do not mean to suggest that all abolitionist activists necessarily
understood their project in precisely these terms. It is an apt
description of their aims, nonetheless.
(49.) Callan, “Discrimination and Religious Schooling”, 57.
(50.) Waldron, “Multiculturalism and Melange” in Robert K. Fullinwider
(ed.), Public Education in a Multicultural Society: Policy, Theory,
Critique (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 114.
(51.) Miller, On Nationality, 135.
(52.) Ibid.
(53.) Ibid., 89–90.
(54.) Ibid., 90.
(55.) Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular, 105.
(56.) Boyd Richardson, People of Terra Nullius (Toronto: Douglas and
MacIntyre, 1993).
(57.) For this argument see McDonough, “Can the Liberal State
Support Cultural Identity Schools?” American Journal of Education, 106
(4) (1998), 463–99. In that essay I defend a right to public support for
“moderate” separate cultural identity schools for aboriginal peoples.
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