COSMO POLITIQUE

Links to my bibliography from A to Z:

A      B     C     D     E     F     G     H        I     J     K (this page)    L     

M     N     O     P       Q       R     S     T     U     V     W/X/Y/Z

Last update: 14 August 2020

Reminder: this page is in two parts; Part 1 is a list of titles detailed in Part 2.

PART 1:

1. Kabar, Ryad. 2013. “The Arab-Palestinian Israelis.” In JCall trip to Israel and Palestinian Territories, edited by David Chemla. Tel Aviv: JCall.
2. Kachru, Braj B. 1981. ‘Introduction: The Other Side of Englis.’ in Braj B. Kachru (ed.), The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures (Pergamon Press: Oxford).
3. ——— (ed.). 1982. The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures (Pergamon Press: Oxford).
4. ———. 1987. ‘American English and other Englishes.’ in Charles A. Ferguson and Shirley Brice Heath (eds.), Language in the USA (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge).
5. ——— (ed.). 1990. The Alchemy of English:The Spread, Functions, and Models of Non-Native Englishes (University of Illinois Press: Champagne-Urbana).
6. Kammoun, Raoudha. 2009. ”La place du français dans le plurilinguisme tunisien’, Cahiers de linguistique: Revue de sociolinguistique et de sociologie de la langue française (Agence Universitaire de la francophonie), 34 21-44.
7. Kapica, Jack. 1993. ‘Canadians want mosaïc to melt, survey finds: Respondents believe immigrants should adopt Canada’s values’, The Globe and Mail.
8. Kaplan, Robert B. 1997. ‘Foreword, Palmam qui meruit Ferat.’ in William Eggington and Helen Wren (eds.), Language Policy: Dominant English, pluralist challenges (John Benjamins Publishing Company: Amsterdam/Philadelphia).
9. Karmis, Dimitrios. 1993. ‘Cultures autochtones et libéralisme au Canada: les vertus médiatrices du communautarisme libéral de Charles Taylor’, Canadian Review of Political Science: 69-96.
10. Karmitz, Marin. 1995. Bande à Part (Grasset).
11. ———. 1997. ‘La mondialisation de l’audiovisuel’, LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE – -: Page 27.
12. Katz, Molly. 1991. Jewish as a second language (Workman publishing: New York).
13. Kaufmann, Miranda. 2017. ‘Black Tudors, the untold story.’.
14. Kawabata, Tai. 1999. ‘Flag, anthem views vary among pollees’, The Japan Times, Aug.6, pp. 1.
15. ———. 1999. ‘Identity of “Kimigayo” composer still a mystery’, The Japan Times, Aug.6, pp. 1.
16. Keen, Ian. 1988. ‘Aborigines and Islanders in Australian Society.’ in Jake M. Najman and Western John S. (eds.), A Sociology of Australian Society: Introductory Readings (Macmillan Education Australia Pty: Melbourne).
17. Kenaz, Yehoshua. 2003. Infiltration (Stock).
18. ———. 2003. Paysage aux trois arbres (Actes Sud).
19. Keneally, Thomas. 1995. A River Town (Sceptre: London).
20. Keon-Cohen, B., and B. Morse. 1984. ‘Indigenous Land Rights in Australia and Canada.’ in P. Hanks and Keon-Cohen B. (eds.), Aborigenes and the Law (George Allen and Unwin: Sydney).
21. Kepel, Gilles. 2013. “Passion Arabe.” In Une oeuvre, Un Destin. Institut du Monde Arabe.
22. ———. 2013. Passion arabe: Journal 2011-2013 (Gallimard: Paris).
23. Kertész, Imre 2015. L’ultime auberge ( Actes Sud: Arles).
24. Khare, R.S. . 1988. Culture and democracy (University Press of America: (Lanham).
25. Khoury, Saman. 2013. “Jerusalem and the 2012 aftermath.” In JCall trip to Israel and Palestinian Territories. Tel Aviv: JCall.
26. Kim, Kwang Chung (ed.)^(eds.). 1999. Koreans in the Hood: Conflict with African Americans (John Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London).
27. Kim, L.S., and Gilberto Moisés Blasini. 2001. ‘The Performance of Multicultural Identity in US Network Television: Shiny, Happy Popstars (Holding Hands)’, Emergences, 11: 287-07.
28. King, Thomas. 2013. The inconvenient Indian: A curious account of native people in North America (Anchor Canada/Pinguin Random House Canada: Toronto).
29. Klima, Edward S. 1964. ‘Negation in English.’ in J.A. Fodor and J.J. Katz (eds.), The structure of language: readings in the philosophy of language (Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs, N.J.).
30. Kloss, Heinz. 1966. Exerpts from the National Minoritiy Laws of the United States of America (East-West Center: Honolulu).
31. ———. 1977. The American Bilingual Tradition (Newbury House: Rowley, MA).
32. Koechlin, S. . 2009. ‘L’épée de Damoclès du référendum’, Horizons, Le Magazine suisse de la recherche scientifique: 24.
33. Kompridis, N. . 2008. ”Struggling Over the Meaning of Recognition.’ in K. Olson (ed.), Adding Insult to Injury (Verso: London).
34. Koppelman, Andrew. 1998. Antidiscrimination Law & Social Equality (Yale University Press: New Haven and London).
35. Koppes, Clayton R., and Gregory D. Black. 1987. Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda shaped World War II Movies (The Free Press: New York).
36. Korkeakivi, Antti. 2013. “Overview of OHCHR interventions regarding Linguistic and Minority Rights.” In Roundtable on linguistic rights.
37. Kosonen, Kimmo 1998. ‘What makes an education project work? Conditions for successful functioning of an Indian primary-level programme of nonformal education. ‘, Publications in Education, University of Joensuu, 41.
38. ———. 2002. ‘Vernacular literacy in community development: the Chong of Thailand. .’ in J. Lo Bianco (ed.), Voices from Phnom Penh. Development & Language: Global Influences & Local Effects (Language Australia: Melbourne).
39. Kosonen, Kimmo. 2003. ‘Community participation in minority language education in Thailand’, Journal of Southeast Asian Education, 4: 104-36.
40. Kosonen, Kimmo 2005. ‘Vernaculars in literacy and basic education in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand’, Current Issues in Language Planning, 6: 122-42.
41. ———. 2006. ‘Multigrade teaching among ethnic minority children: the language issue.’ in Linley Cornish (ed.), Reaching EFA through multi-grade teaching: Issues, contexts and practices (Kardoorair Press: Armidale, NSW, Australia).
42. Kosonen, Kimmo and Guttman, Cynthia 1994. “A Notre Portée: l’histoire de PROPEL, projet d’education non-formelle pour les enfants ruraux en Inde.” In. Paris: UNESCO.
43. Koubi, Geneviève. 1993. ‘Droit, Droit à la Différence, Droit à l’Indifférence en France’, Revue Trimestrielle des Droits de l’Homme.
44. ———. 1995. ‘Penser les minorités en droit.’ in A. Fenet (ed.), Le droit et les minorités – analyses et textes (Bruylant: Bruxelles).
45. ———. 1998. “La République Française face aux minorités: silences et réticences.” In Quatrième colloque international du Centre international de la common law en français: Minorités et organisation de l’Etat, edited by Nicolas Levrat. Bruxelles: Bruylant.
46. ———. 2000. ‘Penser les Minorités en Droit.’ in Alain Fenet, Geneviève Koubi and Isabelle Schulte-Tenckhoff (eds.), Le Droit et les Minorités: analyses et textes (Bruylant: Bruxelles).
47. ———. 2002. ‘Traductions et Droit’, Droit et Cultures, 44: 9-19.
48. Koubi, Geneviève, and Daphné Romy-Masliah. 2012. ‘4e de couverture.’ in Geneviève Koubi and Daphné Romy-Masliah (eds.), S’entendre sur la langue (Droit et Cultures, L’Harmattan: Paris).
49. ———. 2012. ‘Présentation du numéro.’ in Geneviève Koubi and Daphné Romy-Masliah (eds.), S’entendre sur la langue (Droit et Cultures).
50. Kourouma, Ahmadou. 2000. Allah n’est pas obligé (Editions du Seuil: Paris).
51. Kozhemyakov, Alexey. 2013. “Overview of Council of Europe’s actions regarding Linguistic Rights and Minorities.” In Roundtable on linguistic rights, edited by Fernand De Varennes. UNOG, Geneva.
52. Kristeva. 1981. Le langage, cet inconnu (Editions du Seuil: Paris).
53. Kristof, Nicholas D. , and Shery WuDunn. 2010. La Moitié du Ciel: Enquête sur des femmes extraordinaires qui combattent l’oppression (Les Arènes: Paris).
54. Kroch, Antony, and William Labov. 1972. ‘Resolution in Response to Arthur Jensen (1969)’, Linguistic Society of America Bulletin: 17-18.
55. Kukatas, Chandran. 1993. Multicultural citizens: the philosophy and politics of identity (Center for Independent Study: St. Leonard’s).
56. Kukathas, Chandran. 1995. ‘Are there Any Cultural Rights?’ in Will Kymlicka (ed.), The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford University Press: Oxford).
57. Kymlicka, Will. 1989. Liberalism, Community and Culture (Clarendon Press: Oxford).
58. ———. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship : A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Clarendon Press: Oxford).
59. ——— (ed.). 1995. The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford University Press: Oxford).
60. ———. 1999. ‘Theorizing Indigenous Rights’, University of Toronto Law Journal: 281-93.
61. ———. 2000. ‘Le droit des minorités et le multiculturalisme: l’évolution du débat anglo-américain’, Comprendre, Revue de philosophie et de sciences sociales: 141-72.
62. ———. 2009. ‘Categorizing Groups, Categorizing States: Theorizing Minority Rights in a World of Deep Diversity’, Ethics & International Affairs, 23 371-88.

PART 2:

Kabar, Ryad (2013), ‘The Arab-Palestinian Israelis’, paper given at JCall trip to Israel and Palestinian Territories, Tel Aviv.

I am an israeli and I know more about religion than Yaniv. I am from Barqa village. I am the director of the Jewish Arab center. I came here to volunteer and then worked here until I became a mayor for 5 years and came back to GH.
1,5 million arab israeli. Ici depuis 1948. Les palestiniens sont sous occupation depuis 1967 mais ne sont pas Israéliens comme moi. Ce qui nous caractérise est que nous sommes une minorité autochtone. Ce sont les juifs qui sont les immigrés ici. Nous sommes la minorité la plus réaliste de la région : nous disons aux palestiniens arrêtez de réver à jeter les israéliens à la mer et aux israéliens arrêtez de rêver et rendez les territoires occupés. Nous avons été citoyens mais nous vivions jusqu’en 1961-62 Pendant les guerre aucun acte de violence commis par des arabes israéliens. Je ne souhaite à aucune minorité notre situation d’avoir une fidélité à un état qui est en guerre contre la minorité à laquelle nous appartenons.
Notre identité double d’israéliens et palestiniens s’est éveillée après la première guerre du Liban qui a opposé Israël directement aux Palestiniens. Là s’est réveillé notre identité, surtout avec la vague d’immigration des russes qui a entrainé un racisme inconnu auparavant.
Nous avons un statut égal dans société israélienne, les mêmes droits mais nous nous sentons des citoyens de seconde classe. Objectif: égalité et notre communauté. Nous nous battons au sein de 3 partis politiques (Hadach israélo-palestinienne et deux autres seulement arabes). Plus ce processus marche plus forte est notre identité israélienne. 2 peuples et deux Etats. Ce jour là nous deviendrons une minorité comme vous l’êtes dans votre diaspora. Israël est notre patrie comme la France est la votre. Citoyens israéliens avec des attaches avec l’Etat Palestinien avec lequel nous serions en paix.
La solution 2Peuples 2Etat est la seule viable car nous “barouch hachem”, nous faisons plus d’enfants puisque nous pouvons nous marier plusieurs fois et donc à long terme ce serait au détriment de la société israélienne juive.
Je pense que c’est le moment de faire la paix. La génération de mon père a connu le gouvernement militaire, s’est faite prendre sa terre et a eu peur. Ma génération a découvert a culture juive et la société israélienne. Mon fils aspire aux mêmes choses que les autres jeunes israéliens et ne se contentera pas d’un statut de seconde classe.
64 régionaux conseils de villes arabes.
Négev Bédouins, Centre Musulmans, Druze chrétiens et musulmans en Galilée 20% de la population. Nous travaillons, nous sommes bien intégrés et comme les israéliens nous voulons que nos enfants soient médecins ou avocats.
30% des médecins israéliens sont arabes.
Nous sommes très forts en foot (Sahtine est le champion d’Israël, ils joueront contre le Betar Jerusalem. 3 footballers arabes israéliens jouent dans l’équipe du portugal, équipe que suit la population israélienne pour cette raison)
Ceux qui réussisent parmi nous sont acceptés…comme c’est le cas dans le monde!
Question sur la religion:sur les 20% d’arabers israéliens, 80% sont musulmans. Le mouvement Islamiste s’est développé depuis la Journée de la Terre en 1985. Il se développe dans deux direction. Le groupe du nord, les gens ne votent pas et ne sont pas représentés à la Knesset. Dans le sud, deux députés islamistes. Je prie 5 fois par jours mais je ne me considère pas comme religieux. Ma femme est allée à l’école juive, ma fille ne porte pas le voile, mon fils est avocat et n’est pas religieux.
LIEN DE SOLIDARITE entre les israéliens pauvres et les palestiniens? agriculture et industrie jusqu’en 48. après la guerre, nous avons perdu nos terres donc notre subsistance. On les a expulsés. Jusqu’en 67 difficultés à circuler mais maintenant
Am Israel Hai: Les arabes construisent et les Juifs israéliens vivent et les druzes gardent.
4 fois plus de pauvres parmi les arabes que par rapport aux juifs. Mais si on compare notre situation socio-eco est bien meilleure que la plupart des arabes de par le monde. Mais pour obtenir des subventions c’est un peu plus dûr pour nous.
Session des questions:
Nous avons participé dans les manifs de 2011 mais nous sommes globalement déçus par l’Etat car bien que représentés à la Knesset (dans le Meretz et dans les partis arabes), notre situation n’a pas vraiment vu d’amélioration.
La majorité des Israéliens arabes sont optimistes comme je le suis. On a des critiques à l’égard de l’Etat mais nous avons aussi des critiques sur nous-mêmes car nous n’aimons pas les critiques. Nous ne contestons pas que l’hébreu soit la langue majoritaire, mais nous avons aussi du désespoir car lorsque des attentats atteignent des palestiniens, nous déplorons les lois racistes.
Dans quelles instances êtes-vous traités comme citoyens de second zone? Nous n’avons pas le contrôle de la terre. Nous avons voté pour Rabin et nous sommes senti bien depuis Oslo. Je peux avoir n’importe quel travail, mais à diplôme égal je dois être meilleur que le juif pour décrocher un job. Mais souvent ce sont les juifs qui parlent en totre nom. Nous devons parler nous-mêmes. Je serai en France autour du 10 juin 2013 pour une réunion de maires juifs et arabes.

Kachru, Braj B. 1981. Introduction: The Other Side of English. In The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures, edited by B. B. Kachru. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

1: “Other tongue” is not an innocent term; actually it is a multi-faceted concept with a long history and different manifestations in various regions of the world. The vision of an other tongue evokes memories of language bing used as a powerful -sometimes ruthless- instrument for religious and cultural subjugations and for colonization. There are elevated (standard) varieties, and not-so-elevated (pidgin) varieties for local commerce, international trade, and even political maneuvering. In the past the other gongues (as second or foreign languages) have been associated with majestic empires (e.g. Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit). In our time Dutch, Enlglish, French, Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese have been used, in varying degrees, as the tongues of  colonizers. A language has often been used as a tool for unifying a nation, for establishing political boundaries, and for creating dissent.

___ ed. 1982. The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures, Pergamon Institute of English. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

___1987. American English and other Englishes. In Language in the USA, edited by C. A. Ferguson and S. Brice Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

21:The total number of languages in the world is large: say between 4,000 and 4,500. But, considering the total world population of 4 milliona and 19 million, this seems to be a small number. If we divide this number by 4,500 languages, we have approximately one language for every 893,111 people, but that is not exactly how human languages are distributed. There are only five languages that can claim a really large number of speakers, namely Chinese (811 million), English (363 million), Hindi-Urdu (271 million), Russian (240 million) and Spanish (219 million).
Of these languages, only English can claim to have attained the enviable position of a more or les UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE.
A universal language is one which, in its various forms and functions, is used by a large portion of the human population for easy communication between people of diverse cultural and language backgrounds.
Attempts have been made toward developing a universal or interantional language since the 1880s. These attempts, however, have not been successful, though some artificial international languages have had partial success; for example Esperanto. Other such attempts were much less successful, as was the case with Nivial, Occidental, Interlingua, Volapük, Ido, etc. The reasons for theri failure are many, but the fact is that they have less chance of general acceptance ad survival thatn does a choice from among existing NATURAL LANGUAGE.
In the past, several natural languages have acquired widespread roles in ritual, diplomacy, literature, or fashion. One does not have to think hard to find examples: Latin for ritualistic uses and learned professions in Europe, French in diplomacy and fashion, and Sanskrit for ritualistic, religious and leterary functions in South Asia. However, in the last two centuries, the picture has completely changed. English, which was a minor language in the sixteenth century, has slowly but definitely gained an edge over other major languages as an internatioanl language.
“We have yet no prosodia, not so much as a tolerable dictionary or a grammar, so our language is in a manner barbarous”(cited in Baugh and Cable 1978: 255). The primary reasons for such development and expansion arenot essentially linguistic, but political, social, and technological.

22:After all, linguistically speaking, or in terms of the communicative potential of a language, any human language has the potential of becoming an international language.
The main reason(for the attainment of such a status by English) was colonization, which brought major parts of Africa and Asia under the direct rule of English-Speaking Britain. This initiated the diffusion of various types and dregrees of BILINGUALISM in English. The introduction of western English-medium education resulted in the emergence of native elite groups in the far-flung areas of the empire, who in turn became the supporters of English and of western models of education.
The positive aspects of English include its long and rich literary tradition in various forms, its widespread use as a language of science and technology, and its proven capacity to absorb from varous languages and cultures.

___ (ed.), (1990), The Alchemy of English:The Spread, Functions, and Models of Non-Native Englishes (Champagne-Urbana: University of Illinois Press).

Kammoun, Raoudha (2009), ‘La place du français dans le plurilinguisme tunisien’, Cahiers de linguistique: Revue de sociolinguistique et de sociologie de la langue française (Agence Universitaire de la francophonie), 34 (1), 21-44.

Abstract (communiqué par l’auteur(e), faites-en autant): Quand on traite du problème linguistique d’un pays du Maghreb, c’estbien plus qu’un e approche linguistique ou discursive à laquelle on a décidé de s’atteler. La question linguistique au Maghreb et plus particulièrement en Tunisie est très complexe et ne se résume pas à un outil de communication ou d’interaction.
D’aucuns réduisent et résument la situation ou le profil linguistique
de la Tunisie à une simple diglossie fonctionnelle, à un double
registre ou à deux niveaux de langue qui s’exercent selon les besoins
de la situation et du contexte. En limitant l’analyse à l’observation
linguistique et pragmatique, on procède à une opération d’occultation
du vrai problème qui est constitutionnel, dont les véritables enjeux
s’appellent identité, rapports sociaux, religion et légitimité.
En plus du dualisme interne à la langue arabe, commun à tous les pays arabes, qui se distingue par la variété dialectale de chaque pays et
la variété littérale classique, le français a fait son apparition  à
travers la colonisation dans les pays du Maghreb et représente depuis,
d’abord, la langue du colonisateur et de l’oppression puis celle de
l’ouverture et de la réussite et enfin celle de l’aliénation,  une
entrave à l’accomplissement et l’épanouissement de l’être.
Cette situation qui dure jusqu’aujourd’hui va nous conduire à nous
poser la question suivante : est-ce que le français jouit toujours
d’autant de légitimité et de prestige ou est-ce qu’il est en train de
subir les conséquences des crises majeures que rencontrent les pays du Maghreb dont la Tunisie, mettant en cause la montée d’une affirmation identitaire monovalente ?

Kapica, Jack. 1993. Canadians want mosaïc to melt, survey finds: Respondents believe immigrants should adopt Canada’s values. The Globe and Mail.

cité par Bissoondath, Neil. Le Marché aux Illusions: la méprise du multiculturalisme. Montréal: Boréal, 1995: 15.
“La plupart des Canadiens pensent que la mosaïque multicultuelle ne donne pas les réultats escomptés et qu’elle devrait être remplacée par un melting pot culturel. Environ 72% des personnes interrogées sont d’avis que l’image d’un pays formé de communautés à l’intérieur duquel chaque groupe ethnique et racial préserve son identité grâce aux politiques gouvernementales doit céder la place au mode d’intégration pratiqué aux Etats-Unis. Le sondage (…) indique que les Canadiens sont “de plus en plus fatigués” des demandes des groupes ethniques et qu’ils sont mécontents du “manque d’harmonie” à l’intérieur de la société. “ils manifestent, dit le sondage, une préférence marquée pour l’”homogénéisation” de la société grâce à l’adoption, par les immigrants, des valeurs et du mode de vie du Canada

Kaplan, Robert B. 1997. Foreword, Palmam qui meruit Ferat. In Language Policy: Dominant English, pluralist challenges, edited by W. Eggington and H. Wren. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

p. xi: 1. to examine the impact of English in countries in which it is taken for granted
2. to explore how the dominance of English impacts on the development of national language poicies, the maintenance of minority languages, the ability to provide services in other languages, the efforts to promote first language and bilingual education programs, and the opportunities for adult and child second language and literacy training
3. to examine language and language-in-education policies in these countries and the extent to which English influences various policies or precludes others.
xii: 1.The notion of “one nation/one language” is alive and well -while all of the countries represented use English, it is clear that each has its own agenda for the learining and the teaching of English
2. The notion is also alive and well that the learning of the natinal language is not so much about linguistics as it is about the culucation of cultural values or about the support of the absolutely undocumented assumption that an equation exists between “proper ” language use and moral behavior.
3. The notion is, additionally alive and well that one creates and implements language policy through the education sector.
4. Finally, the notion is alive and well that individual teachers or teacher-organization have some hope of influencing language policy at the national level.
national bilingualism means that everyone speaks at least two languages, though not necessarily the same two.
TESOL: teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages
EFL: English as Foreign language
ESL: English as Second Language
TESL: Teachers of English as Second Language.
xxii: Except for Australia, none of the countries represented (in this volume) has a national language policy.

Karmis, Dimitrios. 1993. Cultures autochtones et libéralisme au Canada: les vertus médiatrice du communautarisme libéral de Charles Taylor. Canadian Review of Political Science (26/1):69-96.

quoted by Kymlicka, Will. Multicultural Citizenship. Edited by David Miller and Alan Ryan, Oxford Political Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.

Karmitz, Marin. 1995. Bande à Part: Grasset.

___1997. La mondialisation de l’audiovisuel. LE MONDE DIPLOMATIQUE – – (MAI):Page 27.

Producteur, distributeur et exploitant, Marin Karmitz est un ” homme à part ” (1), il est le seul indépendant français à avoir réussi à bâtir un circuit cinématographique puissant, redouté. Il envisage aussi de créer une chaîne de télévision à vocation cinéphilique et civique. Ses récentes productions l’ont conduit en Europe centrale où il a produit les nouveaux films du Polonais Krzysztof Kieslowski et du Roumain Lucian Pintilié. Selon lui, le problème actuel n’est pas
l’affrontement cinématographique avec l’Amérique, mais la partition entre un cinéma de riches véhiculant une propagande et qui existe ailleurs qu’aux Etats-Unis, et un cinéma de pauvres fait par des créateurs qui existe également aux Etats-Unis.

L’ensemble des productions nationales européennes sont dans une situation grave en raison de la mondialisation de l’audiovisuel, née après la chute du mur de Berlin. Cette mondialisation se traduit par le développement des nouvelles technologies et la concentration du secteur. Le marché est dominé par quatre multinationales d’origine américaine et par les deux pôles européens que sont
Canal Plus/Havas et Bertelsman. Mais les groupes américains ont pour culture la production d’images, puis leur diffusion ; les groupes européens, et c’est leur faiblesse, sont avant tout des diffuseurs. Malheureusement, on ne fait pas suffisamment l’analyse du contenu et de l’idéologie
envoyés par les Etats-Unis. Il s’agit là d’un système de propagande inédit à ce jour dans l’histoire de l’humanité. Tant qu’il y avait deux blocs, nous avions deux idées qui s’opposaient. Aujourd’hui, une seule idée domine. C’est une situation gravissime pour les démocraties européennes.

Les Etats ont un rôle important à jouer. Ils doivent mener une réflexion sur leur politique culturelle.
Ces Etats, on le sait, sont affaiblis, n’ayant plus ni la maîtrise de la politique économique ni celle de la politique étrangère. Il reste deux domaines qu’ils se doivent de maîtriser : l’éducation nationale et l’audiovisuel. Chaque Etat européen possède encore un service public dont la mission est de
défendre l’intérêt général face aux intérêts privés. A ma connaissance, aucune réflexion de ce type n’existe en Europe. Au contraire, on réduit les budgets de ces chaînes qui sont de plus en plus financées par la publicité, dans une logique commerciale. Quelle est la politique européenne en matière de culture ? La politique des quotas de diffusion ne peut fonctionner à échelle européenne tant que l’on ne posera pas le débat en termes idéologiques et non quantitatifs. On oublie constamment que l’image et le son sont porteurs d’idées. Les Etats-Unis ont bien compris ces enjeux.
D’autres avant eux l’avaient également fait. Hitler l’avait compris, Staline aussi et même de Gaulle.
Les effets de cette prise de pouvoir de l’image sont dévastateurs. On peut le constater dans la vie politique où l’on ne parle plus que par slogans, par petites phrases de 18 secondes.

On peut se demander si le rôle de l’industrie française est de financer l’industrie américaine. C’est pourtant ce qui se passe à travers les pré-achats massifs faits en matière de programmes satellite.
Cet argent ne va pas dans la production. Tout comme ces sommes énormes englouties dans les programmes de câble, de satellite, de télévision de haute définition, ou pour le financement de la MGM ! C’est comme si l’on sacrifiait l’ensemble des industries de pointe européennes. Tout cela se fait dans un total mépris du citoyen et de la démocratie. .

http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1997/05/A/8152.html
TOUS DROITS RÉSERVÉS © 1999 Le Monde diplomatique.

Katz, Molly. 1991. Jewish as a second language. New York: Workman publishing.

I am Jewish. My husband Bill is Not. One day, my mother had to get her blood pressure checked. She did not need a ride, she said; she’d call a cab. Bill said, “Okay”.
Of course, she stopped speaking to us.
“How could you?” I asked Bill.
How could I what?”
“Let her take a cab”.
“But” Bill said, “it was her idea””You should have known how to translate” I said.
He said, “My mother would have taken a cab”.
“She is not Jewish. If a Jewish person offers to take a cab, she never means it”.
Well, you’ll have to be patient with me”, he said, “Jewish is only my second language”
Once, nobody married Jews, except other Jews(and rich, neurotic non-Jews trying to torture their Patrician families after all other methods, usch as working in a live-sex show, had failed.
But there are many of you out there now, non-Jews swimming in the rubber cement of our mores, and you need help. There is much to learn about things you thought you already knew hoew to do such as talk, think, eat,feel and behave. Keeping a low profile, in the hope that your new lifestyle will evolve smoothly if you are observant and taktful is about as effective as walking into a panther cage with a shoelace for a whip.
To learn the Jewish language, you need to understand one point especially: this does not mean Yiddish, the Eastern European language derived from German with which we Jews often pepper our English. You’ll never have to speak Yiddish, except to stumble over a work or phrase occasionally with the awkwarness expected of you.
Jews know your uncomfortable with Yiddish. We know you feel left out. As well you should: it is designed to keep you out.
We like to believe your tongue can’t form the tangles of consonants necessary to say a Yiddish world. Therefore, no matter how it comes out, you’ll be corrected. One of us will explain to you that gonif, the way the pronounced it, doesn’t simply mean thief, but a Bosnian thief who steals your sister’s ankle bracelet.
Dont’ try to improve your pronunciation, though. Instead, learn just enough about Yiddish to make your errors truly hysterical. This effort will pay off in family relations: your in-laws will have a blast hooting at your misteakes (which they know you’ll find endearing(.
Be sure your usage is faulty too. This confirms our conviction that Yiddish defies translation, that mere Englsih can’t match its intricate layers of meaning -and that non-Jews are hopeless when t6hey try to use it. We love to hear you deliver howlers like “when she found out she wasn’t invited, she made such a big schmatta you cound hear her down the street” or “Put everything on my bagel -nova, onions, the whole schlemiel”
No, the true language of Jews is not Yiddish. It is a complex twist and somersaults of everyday American conversation, the swamps and thickets of behavior. It is nuances and expectations, hidden meanings and unvoiced points systems…wins, losses and dews in competitions you had no idea you entered.
This book is your guide to the mysterious web of your new envoronment. Study it carefully, and the secrets of our language will unfold.

Kaufmann, Miranda. 2017. ‘Black Tudors, the untold story.’.

quoted by Carey, Jonathan. 2018. ‘The Africans Who Called Tudor England Home: Hundreds of Africans lived freely during the reign of Henrys VII and VIII.’, Atlas Obscura, Accessed June 5, 2020.

Kawabata, Tai. 1999. Flag, anthem views vary among pollees. The Japan Times, Aug.6, 1.

Roughtly 90 out of 100 residents bolled by the Japan Times in Tokyo, Osaka and Hiroshima this week said they recognize the Hinomaru flag as a national symbol but almost 40 apposed “Kimigayo” as the national anthem.
The street intervews were done before the expected passage Monday of a bill to legally recognize Hinoraru as Japan’s national flag and “Kimigayo” as the anthem.
The Liberal Democratic party sponsored the ill, sying it hopes to put an end to a controversy over the symbols’ use at high school graduation ceremony.It was proposed days after a high school principal in Hiroshima prefecture committed suicide on Feb. 28. Teachers at high school were refusing to obey and educaion board order that the falg be raised and “Kimigayo” sung at the school’s graduation: the board was refusing to yield.
Though the flag and song are frequently used at national and international sproting event, they have never been legally sanctioned as national symbols.
The pollee’s ambivalence constrasted sharply with the broad support the bill had among lawmakers when it cleared the Lower House by a vote of 403-86 last week…
Kimigayo refers to the emperor as the nation’s leader….

tableau: views on the Hinomaru and “Kimigayo”: results of street interview with 100 Japanese in Tokyo, Osaka and Hiroshima
Do you know Kimigayo by heart: YES 70 NO 30 OTHERS
Do you think Kimigayo is suitable as Japan’s anthem YES 58 NO 36 OTHERS 6
Do you feel reluctant to sing Kimigayo or see the Hinomaru hoisted at entrance and graduation ceremonies
YES 30 NO 69 OTHERS 1
Do you think the Hinomaru is suitable as the national flag YES 88 NO 6 OTHERS 6
Do you have a Hinomaru flag at home
YES 27 NO 72 OTHERS 1
Do you put up the Hinomaru on national holidays
YES 10 NO 89 OTHERS 1
Does the Hinomaru make you think of the war
YES 29 NO 67 OTHERS 4
Do you know that the Hinormaru and Kimigayo were not legally recognized as the nation’s flag and anthem
YES 63 NO 36 OTHERS 1
Do you support the bill to regally recognize the Hinormaru as the national flag and Kimigayo as the anthem
YES 46 NO 44 OTHERS 10

___1999. Identity of “Kimigayo” composer still a mystery. The Japan Times, Aug.6, 1.

Aside from the association “Kimigayo” has with Japan’s miliatrist past, the bill to give de jure national anthem status to the song begs another historical question: Who composed the melody?
The bill credits Hiromori Hayashi, a chief Meiji Era court musician.
But there has been a long standing controversy over the question of who actually composed the “Kimigayo” melody, and at least 9 books have been written on the subject.
John William Fenton, an Englishman, first composed a melody for the traditional “Kimigayo” poem, the oritiganl form of which dates back more than 1,000 years. He idid the work in 1869 or 1870 for a Satsuma clan band.
The Imperial Japanese Navy adopted Fenton’s melody for ceremonial occasions to praise the emperor. Because Fenton did not know Japanese and composed the melody hurriedly, it was not fit for singing and was unpopular.
Selon la legende populaire, on a alors demandé a Hayashi to reviser la mélodie…controverse.

Keen, Ian. 1988. Aborigines and Islanders in Australian Society. In A Sociology of Australian Society: Introductory Readings, edited by J. M. Najman and W. J. S. Melbourne: Macmillan Education Australia Pty.

213: This chapter examines the position of Aborigines and Torre·Strait Islanders in Australian society in the context of the historical development of their relationship Key factors in this history have been the evolution of the British industrial economy in relation the the British colonies, the related development of Australian economy and society, and the nature of indigenous economic and social life.
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population forms about 1 per cent of the Australian one. The 1991 Census put the Aboriginal population at about 260,0000, compared with a total Australian population of nearly 17 million. But just who counts as an ‘Aborigine’ is not a simple matter (Beckett 1988; Keen1988; Smith 1980; Thiele 1992). The category ‘Aborigine’ (and ‘Aborginal’) arose through interaction with colonising peoples, mainly from Europe (…). In pre-colonial Australia, the population was divided by many different kinds of cultural categories, on the basis of language, locality, descent and totemic ancestry. Originally ‘aborigine’ was a term applied by colonisers to the people they found living in the continent.

213-214: this category, together with related ones, came to be adopted by these people themselves and at least some of their descendants, contrasting their identity with that of ‘white’ or other kinds of people.
For the purposes of this chapter, ‘Aborigines’, ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Islander’ are used in two main ways First, Aborigines or Torres Straight Islanders are people who identify as such, and who are
identified in this way by other Aboriginal and Islander people.
These are not clearly demarcated categories; in periods when legislation removed from Aboriginal people many of the freedoms enjoyed by the majority, lighter-skinned people were classified by
the authorities in racial terms such as ‘half-caste’ or ‘quadroon’. People may now choose to identify themselves as ‘Abonriginal’ on the grounds of descent from Aboriginal people, or they may choose not to take this identity. For reasons such as these, the Aboriginal population revealed in the Census has grown in recent decades partly due to more people identifying as Aboriginal, and partly through natural increase.
Another way in which the terms ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Islander’ are used in this chapter, is to refer to the indigenous inhabitants of Australia and the Torres Srrait Islands and their ways of life,
before these became social identities for the people themselves. It is in this sense that I write of pre-colonial ‘Aboriginal economy’.
Torres Strait Islanders are treated here as a somewhat distinct category because many regard themselves as different from mainland Aborigines, Moreover, their pre- and post-colonial cultures were and are very different from Aboriginal cultures of the mainland and Tasmania
It is important to stress the heterogeneity of Aboriginal and Islander lifestyles, beliefs, and degrees of integration with the wider society. It is important also to emphasise the great difference between Aboriginal and non-abonginal cultures. Many people whom non-Aborigines do not recognise as Aborigines, but label ‘half-castes’ as against ‘real”full-blood’ Aborigines, maintain a strong sense of cultural distinctiveness, and identify as Aboriginal or by means of a more local identity such as Koon, Murn or Nyungar.
Recent anthropological accounts of the ways of life of Aboriginal people of southern Australia (i.e. those areas most densely settled by Europeans) show that they have distinctively Aboriginal cultures, demonstrated for example in modes of speech, kin relationships and family organisation, socialisation of the young, and general values (Keen 1988).

The chapter begins with a discussion of the development of Australian capitalism and its impact on Aboriginal social life

216 :

hat the colonies supplied this need to an increasing extent. As well, it became more profitable to invest labour in the colonies than at home. As Bntain became less able to compete effectively with other industrial nations, especially Germany and the United States, it relied on colonial expansion to supply an export marker

Settler Capitalism
The Australian economy and society developed in a way that was to radically affect the lives of Aborigines and Islanders. Australian economy and society had some features in common with certain other colonies of Europe Argentina, Uruguay, Chule, and New Zealand — and has been labelled ‘settler capitalism’ by Denoon (1989). In common with several of these colonies, Australia began as a military garrison outpost of a European empire.The hunting and gathering mode of subsistence of the indigenous peoples was such that they could not be exploited in order to support a population of conquering settlers. Rather, the new population was introduced as an enclave, absorbing some of the indigenous people, but destroying and replacing the indigenous economic
system. (In some of these colonies, but not Australia, the colonisers did encounter agricultural communities, after a period of consolidation.) As the colonisers fared out into the hinterland of the garrison outpost, they found plenty of land, but little labour, and pastoralism dominated production. The administration centred at the registered titles and protected the property of the
new landowners within the frontier, who consolidated control over Land, labour and income from herds. On the frontier, with the support of police and the military, individuals fought to appropriate land, defeat the indigenous people, and survive.
The colony of New South Wales, established in 1788 primarily as a gaol, was at first dependent on England for supplies, but as Drakaltis-Snmth (1981) points out, a major goal of the early colonial administration in Australia was self-sufficiency in agriculture, put into practice by encouraging small-scale ex-convicts (emancipist) farming At the same time the military-bureaucratic empire obtained large grants of land to which they constantly added by buying our indebted farmers, so creating a class of wage labourers. The principal source of labour during this period, however, was assigned convict labour; indigenous labour was carely used except inthe earliest years for harvesting, and ‘bush work’ such as tracting, and searching for water (Drakalus-Smirh 1981: 38).
From the 187Os, the colony became a supplier of primaly products to feed British industry and the home marker, with a strong emphasis at first on wool production and, later, meat and wheat.
Between 1821 and 1833 more than 22,000 convicts were transported (…)

Kenaz, Yehoshua. 2003. Infiltration. Translated by Pinhas-Delpuech, Rosie: Stock.

___2003. Paysage aux trois arbres. Translated by Pinhas-Delpuech, Rosie: Actes Sud.

cf. Lema, L. (2003). “Vivre à Tel-Aviv: Yehoshua Kenaz: les reflets intimes d’un pays en guerre.” Le Temps 4 octobre, pp. 46.
Lema, L. (2003). “Petites histoires sans importance: Israël.” Le Temps 4 octobre, pp. 46.

Keneally, Thomas. 1995. A River Town. London: Sceptre.

56:’Whatever you say.’ said the boy.
He didnt sound like his parents. It was as if the sun had got
inside hir nose and throat and dried all the cords. His say rounded
like sigh. This is what it is to be an emigrant. Your children won’t
speak like you. He’d never thought of it till it happened.
126:The underpinning proposition of our existence is that we live in a robust dominion of British citizens. in a smiling land whose safety is dependent on the British fleet and on British military force. Thus. if the centre of the Empire is under threat, we are by that fact ourselves under threat. Britain stands between our smiling society and the prospect of our becoming a mongrelised
province of Asia. For that reason it behoves us to help Britain
in every season of her distress.

Keon-Cohen, B., and B. Morse. 1984. Indigenous Land Rights in Australia and Canada. In Aborigenes and the Law, edited by P. Hanks and K.-C. B. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin.

Kepel, Gilles (2013), ‘Passion Arabe’, paper given at Une oeuvre, Un Destin, Institut du Monde Arabe, 27 mars 2013.

Conférence inaugurale (ironie du calendrier le jour du Mercredi de la Passion!) du cycle Une Oeuvre, Un Destin tous les mercredis à l’IMA. Cet arabisant plein d’humour et doté de la faculté à la fois de très bien comprendre et de se distancer de son objet de recherche est rattaché notamment à l’Institut d’Etudes Politiques. Il retrace dans l’ouvrage éponyme son voyage effectué pendant ce que l’on a appelé Les Printemps arabes “car pour éviter de réfléchir, on utilise des comparaisons, ici avec le Printemps de Prague ou encore le Printemps des Peuple de 1848”. Allant de la Tunisie à Oman, au Yemen, au Qatar, en Palestine, au Liban etc….il s’est interrogé sur “que se joue-t-il dans le monde arabe?”. Ce voyage intervient au moment précis où Mohamed Bouazizi s’immola par le feu et où l’IEP jugea opportun de fermer les chaires arabes “croyant que l’anglais et l’informatique suffisaient pour comprendre le monde”.
“En fait, les Révolutions arabes ne constituent ni un copié collé de révolutions occidentales, ni un habillage civilisé de barbus”.
Le fait est qu’on peut constater dans tous ces pays une émergence du sentiment de citoyenneté: “Ils ne pourront plus se compoter comme avant”.

Le fait fondamental est que les Arabes “ont découvert et se sont emparés de leur liberté d’expression”.
Il distingue trois étapes:
1) Un renversement des dictatures
2) Une captation islamiste des révolutions
3) L’étape actuelle où Les sociétés civiles qui se dressent contre les tentations liberticides pendant que les salafistes récupèrent les frustations sociales qui n’ont fait que s’aggraver.
les Salafistes parlent de “la secte égarée des Frêres Musulmans.

Tout ceci ne doit pas nous faire oublier la dimension cosmopolite de ce débat puisque on peut parler de véritable interpénétration, notamment avec la double nationalité de certains députés tant en Tunisie qu’en France, nombre de députés au parlement tunisien ayant la nationalité française et de députés français ayant la nationalité algérienne. On peut parler de contenus mixtes identitaires à la fois présentant des éléments communs et des éléments différents.

Autre fait inédit, la friction arabes-Israël s’est aujourd’hui déplacée sur une friction fondamentale entre Sunnites et Chiites.
Il existe malgré tout une crainte de régression dans le domaine des droits de l’homme et surtout de la femme.

Enfin, Keppel met en avant ” l’effet de loupe” opéré par Al-Jezeera (et par là du Qatar) dont le rôle a été plus qu’instrumental dans la mise en scène des “Frêres Mus’”
Le mot “laïcité” est le mot tabou et on lui préfère celui de société civile.

— (2013), Passion arabe: Journal 2011-2013 (Témoins Gallimard; Paris: Gallimard).

PROLOGUE
DUBAI: Lundi 4 février 2013: La cité du rêve
Comme dans les empires coloniaux européens d’antan, toutes les indications sont bilingues, à cette différence que l’arabe est désormais au-dessus de l’anglais. Il n’en constitue pourtant que la traduction, des urbanistes occidentaux ayant conçu et mis en oeuvre le développement de la métropole de verre et d’acier dont les tentacules pénètrent chaque jour plus loin dans le désert et dans la mer.

Kertész, Imre (2015), L’ultime auberge (Arles: Actes Sud).

citation de la p. 45 par Finkielkraut, Alain (2015), La Seule Exactitude (Paris: Éditions Stock), p. 239:
Dans son journal publié sous le titre L’ultime auberge Imre Kertész écrit:” Les jours misérables du déclin de l’Europe. L’Europe s’aplatit devant l’islam, le supplie de lui faire grâce.Cette comédie me dégoûte. L’Europe meurt de sa lâcheté, de son incapacité à se défendre et de l’ornière morale évidente dont elle ne peut s’extraire depuis Auschwitz”

Khare, R.S. (1988), Culture and democracy (Lanham: University Press of America,).

Khoury, Saman (2013), ‘Jerusalem and the 2012 aftermath’, paper given at JCall trip to Israel and Palestinian Territories, Tel Aviv, April 30, 2013.

starts where Abdallah ended. We made an extraordinary compromise on the land which used to be theirs. All what remains from my own village is its church built by my grand-father. For us to make this compromise that we accept less than 22% is that we have a viable, continuous and that the green line is actually a red line. East of green line, almost one million colonizers. French use the right term with colonies and not settlements.
STATUS OF JERUSALEM
A war crime and ethnic cleansing is taking place
WHAT HAPPENS AFTER NOV 2012 and Palestinian statehood at the UN on the 1967 borders which is accepted as the Palestinian borders. We have a new situation. I caution those 1 million colons and their infrastructures which are contradicting international law. We’ll see action taken against them in the International Criminal courts as they took our land on the ground of security.

I want security for myself but also for my neighbour. Israelis should realize and do the same thing. Pretext of security is actually an excuse for land grabbing and Jerusalem is an integral part of the issue.

Kim, Kwang Chung, ed. 1999. Koreans in the Hood: C onflict with African Americans. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press.

Kim, L.S., and Gilberto Moisés Blasini. 2001. The Performance of Multicultural Identity in US Network Television: Shiny, Happy Popstars (Holding Hands). Emergences 11 (2):287-207.

Multiculturalism, as a cultural movement and a contemporary ideology, is expressed and projected through the American media in the context of an increasingly diverse demography.
290: who defines multiculturalism? It is notable to consider that the people who are multicultural did not invent it.
In an attempt to challenge concepts such as “the melting pot”, the idea of multiculturalism came to the foreground in the 1980s as a social and ideological formation where different cultures coexist. In emphasizing and raising attention to the people, food, fashion, stories, art, and music of non-white/non-European cultures, does multiculturalism embrace racial and cultural difference?
(…)the production of multiculturalism engenders its own aesthetic.
(…)multiculturalism adopts and adapts racial difference and transforms it into a new, American product.

King, Thomas (2013), The inconvenient Indian: A curious account of native people in North America (Toronto: Anchor Canada/Pinguin Random House Canada).

XII when I was a kid, Indians were Indians. Sometimes engines with Mohawks or Cherokees or Crees or Backfoot or Tlingits or Seminoles. But mostly they were Indians. Columbus gets blamed for the term, but he wasn’t being malicious. He was looking for India and thought he had found it. He was mistaken, of course, and as time went on various folks and institutions try to make the matter right. Engines became a merry Indians and aboriginals an indigenous people. Lately Indians have become First Nations in Canada and Native American in the United States, but the fact of the matter is that there has never been a good collective noun because there never was a collective to begin with.
53: Indians come in all sorts of social and historical configurations. No the American popular culture is littered with savage, noble, and dying Indians, while in real life we have dead Indians, live Indians, and legal Indians.
70: in Canada, legal Indians are defined by the Indian act, a series of pronouncements and regulations, rides and prohibitions, originally struck in 1876, which has wound it’s sneaky way along to the present day. The act itself does more than just define legal Indians, it has been the main mechanism for controlling the lives and destinies of legal Indians in Canada, and throughout the life of the act, amendments have been made to the original document to find tune this control.
113: in Canada, residential schools begin popping up in the 1840s and by 1932, there were more than 80 schools in operation. 60% of the schools where run by the Catholic Church, with another 30% run by the Anglican church. The rest were run by other Protestant denominations, such as the Presbyterians and the Methodists. In 1850, attendance at residential schools became compulsory for all children from the ages of 6 to 15. There was no opting out. Non-compliance by parents what is punishable by prison terms. Children where forcibly removed from their homes and kept at the schools. As with their US counterparts, schools insisted that the children not have any extensive contact with their families are home communities. Students were for bidden to speak the languages or practice any part of their culture.
119: here’s the irony. Native people have never been resistant to education. We have been educating our children long before Europeans showed up. No where we against our children learning about white culture. By the beginning of the 19th century native and whites had been live living together in the same neighborhood for almost 300 years. Like it or not. It make sense for native people to know English and or French. It made sense to understand how the European mine worked. Education is generally described in terms of “benefits”. But why, in the name of education, should we have been required to give up everything we had, to give up who we wear in order to become something we did not choose to be? Where was the benefit in that? Instead, North America decided that native education had to be narrowly focused on white values, decided that need to values, ceremonies, and languages where inferior and had no value or no place in contemporary curate killer. This was the first abuse of the residential school system
132: The actual size of each allotment varied with tribes and the land they held, but in almost each instance, Indian land went in one end of allotment and surplus land came out the other. Native people, who had helped titled to Psalm 138,000,000 acres in 1887, so that figure reduced to around 48 million acres, much of it desert.
159 chapter 7: “forget about it”. Quotation from Sherman Alexie, how to write the great American Indian Novel:”in the great American Indian Novel, when it is finally Rich and come out all the white people will be Indians and all the Indians will be ghosts“
161: in the early years of engine white relations, native people so land as a shared resource rather than as a commodity. Since then we’ve learned our lesson.
162: we’ve done a reasonably good job of injuring ourselves without the help of non-natives. For instance, for the kids with the beaten each other up over who is the better Indian. Full bloods versus makes blogs. Indians on reservations and reserves versus Indians in cities. Stages versus non-status. Those who are enrolled members of the tribe versus those who are not. Those of us who look engine versus those of us who don’t. We have been and continue to be brutal about these extinctions, a mutated strain of ethnocentrism
165: we are cops, teachers, judges, writers, musicians, painters, soldiers, dances, chefs, businessmen and women, pilots, architects, hockey players, singers. We are doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs. We are everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Just a reminder of a cultural persistence and adaptation.
167: Bill C 31 is a piece of Canadian legislation passed in 1985 as an amendment to the Indian act and designed to address the inequity that existed between status native man and stages native women. Status is it Canadian concept. It doesn’t exist in the United States. Indians in the United States have to deal with blood quantum, the amount of native blood a person has -Full, half, quarter, eight, and so on down the line- and with weather on Delta they are called carrying member of a federally recognized tribes. In Canada, status Indians are simply those Indians who are recognized as Indians by the federal government. In general, status Indians are also treaty Indians, though there are reserves created by lid just good to action rather than by treaty and members of those bones are stages Indians it the same way that 3-D images of status if that makes sense.(…)
168: so long as teachers in June’s Mary stages Indians and their children Mary stages Indians, then no one loses stages. But if stages in jeans begin marrying non-stages in jeans or non-engines, those stages
170: The Royal commission on aboriginal peoples was formed in 1991, With a blue ribbon panel of four aboriginal members and three non-native members. The report was originally budgeted at $8 million for three years, but the Research ran to five years at a cost of some $58 million.
171: The report went on to make recommendations in areas such as governance, health, housing, education, native women’s right, métis right cover and economic development. The expectation was that the government would see the report as an opportunity to renew, amend, and restructure its  relationship with Canada’s First Nations. But that’s not what happened.(…) probably the most embarrassing aspect of the Royal commission on the regional People’s affair was the speed with which the report was buried.
202: perhaps discussing sovereignty today as an absolute concept is a waste of time. Perhaps we should concern ourselves instead with practical sovereignty and asked the question, what part of sovereignty is critical to aboriginal nations in North America? Each nation will, of course, have to answer for it self. However, seeing as my advice is free and as I’m more than happy to give it, I suggest that we concentrate on the issues of tribal membership and resource development,(…) membership in an aboriginal nation is somewhat be a while during combination of travel legislation, federal treaties and agreement, blood quantum, at 19th century and numeration lists, or wrong with tribal regulation and customs. In Canada, the Indian act, along with the treaties, sets some of the terms of reference for band membership, while in the United States, membership, in part, is based on federal recognition of a tribe and the lists that government created to keep track of aboriginal people.
218: land. If you understand nothing else about the history of Indians in North America, you need to understand that the question that really matters is the question of land.

223: from a native perspective, Indian land is Indian. From a contemporary, somewhat legal no the American perspective, native land is land that belongs to the federal government and is on in definite loan to certain kind of groups of native people. To say that that these two views are in conflict is to state the obvious.
225: in fact, treaties have been so successful in separating Indians from them now that I’m surprised there isn’t a national holiday to honor their good work. But we could fix that. We could, if we were so inclined, turn Columbus Day and Victoria day into treaty day. After all Columbus didn’t discover America, and queen Victoria never set foot in Canada.
249: since the Inconvenient Indian is set in North America, since North Americans love happy ever after ending, I thought I’d try to close the book on an optimistic note so I asked native friends who keep abreast of current affairs if they’d noticed any encouraging signs that Native-white relations were moving positive directions.(…) : The Alaska native claims settlement act and the Nunavut land claims agreement.
262: equally worrisome is the role of the federal government. Financial support for teaching French in Nunavut is around $4 million a year while support for teaching Inuktitut comes in at the 1 million mark. Ottawa maybe philosophically inclined to multiculturalism, but it has yet to provide the Inuit with the necessary funds and assistance to establish and maintain an Inuktitut bilingual language program that starts at kindergarten and runs through to grade 12.
263: both the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement are flawed accords.

Klima, Edward S. 1964. Negation in English. In The structure of language: readings in the philosophy of language, edited by J. A. Fodor and J. J. Katz. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
in bibliography of Labov, W. (1972). Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia, PA, University of Pennsylvania Press.

Kloss, Heinz. 1966. Exerpts from the National Minority Laws of the United States of America. Honolulu: East-West Center.

——– 1977. The American Bilingual Tradition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

relevé dans Schiffman, H. F. (1998). Linguistic Culture and Language Policy. London and N.Y., Routledge:

284: Meyer vs Nebraska is The Magna Carta of the non-English School in the USA: the right to a lnaguage other than English was tolerated, but only for adults. Children did not have the right to be raised bilingually. Curiously, Kloss wonders why, with this definitive stamp of tolerance pronounced by the Supreme Court, Americans of non-English speech continued to give up their language in favour of English. This seems to stem from Kloss’s belief that an overt Supreme Court decision ought to have as great an impact, or greater, as the unofficial “absorbing power” of American Society. I would conclude however that the power of linguistic culture is and has been much stronger than any Supreme court Ruling.

Koechlin, S. (2009). “L’épée de Damoclès du référendum.” Horizons, Le Magazine suisse de la recherche scientifique(86): 24.

La démocratie directe a peu d’influence sur le degré de protection des minorités.
Pour les Suissesses et les Suisses, le fait que de nombreuses décisions politiques soient prises directement par le peuple coule de source. La population ne fait pas qu’élire ses représentants au Parlement, elle est également appelée à se prononcer sur divers projets ainsi que sur des initiatives et des référendums. Les avantages de cette démocratie directe sont souvent portés aux nues. Sous un angle scientifique, il n’est toutefois pas évident que cette dernière soit vraiment meilleure et plus équitable qu’une démocratie indirecte dans laquelle le peuple délègue la marche des affaires au Parlement. Certains chercheurs estiment que les minorités pâtissent de la démocratie directe car la majorité prend toujours des décisions qui lui sont favorable lors des votations. D’autres jugent en revanche que les minorités peuvent mieux défendre leurs intérêts dans une démocratie directe. Des chercheurs dirigés par Simon Hug du Département de science politique de l’Université de Genève ont étudié la question en se penchant sur les divers droits des minorités dans 52 Etats dont 22 connaissent une certaine forme de démocratie directe et 30 une démocratie indirecte.

(…)Les scientifiques (…) partaient en effet de l’idée qu’une législation restrictive ou libérale dans un pays dépendait bien plus des positions de sa population que de son système politique.

L’évaluation des données l’a confirmé. Elle a aussi montré que la démocratie directe avait une autre influence. Les chercheurs ont en effet constaté que les lois dans les Etats à démoratie directe sont plus proche de l’opinion moyenne de la population. (…)

Lorsque, sur une question, le peuple est plus favorable à une minorité que le parlement, cela conduit à une loi plutôt plus libérale que dans une démocratie indirecte. A l’inverse, une position plus restrictive de la population amène le parlement à être moins ouvert aux minorités. Pour Simon Hug, il s’agit sans doute d’une influence indirecte: gouvernement et Parlement, en prenant les devants avec docilité tiennent davantage compte de la volonté des électeurs afin d’éviter le risque de référendum. Il exclut en revanche une influence directe du peuple. Dans les domaines étudiés, peu de lois ont en effet vu le jour par consultation populaire.
(…)
(La Suisse) ne se différencie (…) pas des Etats sans démocratie directe. Certains protègent moins les minorités, mais d’autres tout autant.

Kompridis, N. (2008), ‘Struggling Over the Meaning of Recognition’, in K. Olson (ed.), Adding Insult to Injury, (London: Verso).

quoted by Morris, Lydia (2012 ), ‘Citizenship and Human Rights’, The British Journal of Sociology 2, 63 (1).

Koppelman, Andrew. 1998. Antidiscrimination Law & Social Equality. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Koppes, Clayton R., and Gregory D. Black. 1987. Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda shaped World War II Movies. New York: The Free Press.

Korkeakivi, Antti (2013), ‘Overview of OHCHR interventions regarding Linguistic and Minority Rights’, paper given at Roundtable on linguistic rights.

Indigenous Peoples and Minorittes Section, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
HR perspective. Protection of linguistic rights is important for culture and heritage, but the HR obligation is often overlooked. Not enough attention paid to their HR nature. Standards: Charter, Declaration: protection was there from the very beginning, esp. art. covenant 27 etc..HR standards and stages undertaken and endorsed. Not only right to use language and language specific rights, but it encompasses non-discrimination, right to participate to decision making. We are ensuring that HR part is taken into account at OHCHR. Not only message to States and Civil society but also within UN system. UN Network on Minority issues launched last year. Often opposition of State and Minority languages. HR treaty bodies also call for access to teaching of state language and at the same time measures to protect minority languages.
Indigenous issues at the UN are related to another working UN Group.
There are differences and at the same time interlinkages. If you look at studies on minority language education and expert reports, one particular issue is autonomous learning. language rights are seen as political and cultural and seen as a menace. Indigenous peoples have been excellent at spreading the standards as linguistic rights. UN Declaration of minorities has been difficult to make available to all minority languages whereas indigenous languages succeeded. It will come up in English first but in other languages soon!
HR Advocates: access to justice is a linkage between language and HR general rights. Concrete prevention of functioning of minority rights. cf. Cultural Rights of European Charter. Consistent message on minority rights.

Kosonen, Kimmo and Guttman, Cynthia (1994), A Notre Portée: l’histoire de PROPEL, projet d’education non-formelle pour les enfants ruraux en Inde.: ( Paris: UNESCO).
___ (1998), ‘What makes an education project work? Conditions for successful functioning of an Indian primary-level programme of nonformal education. ‘ Publications in Education (41; Joensuu, Finland: University of Joensuu).
— (2002), ‘Vernacular literacy in community development: the Chong of Thailand. ‘ in J. Lo Bianco (ed.), Voices from Phnom Penh. Development & Language: Global Influences & Local Effects (Melbourne: Language Australia), 243-60.
— (2003), ‘ Community participation in minority language education in Thailand. ‘ Journal of Southeast Asian Education, 4 (1), 104-36.
— (2005), ‘Vernaculars in literacy and basic education in Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. (): .
‘ Current Issues in Language Planning, 6 (2), 122-42.
— (2006), ‘Multigrade teaching among ethnic minority children: the language issue. I’, in Linley Cornish (ed.), Reaching EFA through multi-grade teaching: Issues, contexts and practices (Armidale, NSW, Australia:: Kardoorair Press), 239-58.
— (2008), ‘Literacy in local languages in Thailand: Language maintenance in a globalised world’, . International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualis, 11 (2), 170-88.
Kosonen, Kimmo and Benson, Carol (2010), ‘ Language-in-education policy and practice in Southeast Asia in light of the findings from Ethiopia.

his website is http://www.sil.org/sil/roster/kosonen_kimmo.htm

Koubi, Geneviève. 1993. Droit, Droit à la Différence, Droit à l’Indifférence en France. Revue Trimestrielle des Droits de l’Homme (1er avril 1993).

243: Fondée sur l’idéologie égalitaire et libérale de la problématique des droits de l’homme, le Droit français refuse la “différence”.(…)
Les glissements que recèlent les termes juridiques de distinction et de (non-) discrimination dans l’approche du principe d’égalité, éludent toute allusion à cette notion de “différence”.(…)
Lorsque sous la pression des nécessités économiques, réelles ou imaginaires, la mécanique sociale du rejet dessine la trajectoire de l’exclusion, la dynamique juridictionnelle atténue ses excès, définissant des “conditions” pour que les différences trouvent leurs voies dans leurs accomplissement dans le cadre des lois.
244: (…) signifier un ensemble de caractéristiques relatives aux “différences” contredirait les données fondamentales du principe d’égalité de tous les citoyens devant la loi, principe substantiel à la définition d’un état de droit.
Puisque des différences existent, la neutralisation des conflits qu’elles pourraient faire naître est contenue dans la formulation juridique de l’égalité suivant les formes classiques de son évaluation juridictionnelle. Cette neutralisation nécessite la connaissance des “différences” pour mieux les maîtriser ou les réguler dans le respect général de l’ordre juridique. Leur connaissance s’est d’abord exprimée dans l’énoncé des mesures de “protection”, institutionnalisant le concept de “; “distinction”: néanmoins elle suppose un relevé d’”infériorités”, qui fonde la “discrimination positive”. Or peu à peu, elle a conduit à la désignation des “incompatibilités” entre la culture dominante (reconnue comme telle par les pouvoirs publics ) et les systèmes de valuers défendus par des groupes minoritaires (ou dits tels par les pouvoirs publics”.
245: Ces graduations des différenciations contribuent à la création de combinaisons juridiques tendant à signifier des obligations ou des restrictions dans l’exercice des libertés publiques.
Le schéma juridique français prône la globalité par l’égalité comme mode d’approche des différences, la fonctions de la généralité risque de survaloriser le collectif par rapport à l’individuel.
(…)S’investir dans la problématique d’un “droit à la différence” afin de l’enserrer dans les formes juridiques, afin de le protéger et le garantir par le biais des lois, voire de la Constitution, ainsi que par le jeu des conventions internationales, pourrait contenir les dissensions potentielles d’une reconnaissance de fait de certains grupes (de pression) au détriment de la liberté individuelle, personnelle, innovant le principe d’un “droit à l’indifférence”.
La différence n’est pas un choix volontaire; individuelle, elle devrait être évaluée dans l’approche du concept de “liberté personnelle” esquissée par le Conseil constitutionnel. Le droit à être “soi”, comme un droit à sa dignité personnelle, en dehors de toute uniformisation collective est irréductible.
I- Minorités et différence: du collectif à l’individuel
L’objection classique est que la reconnaissance d’un “droit à la différence” conduirait à la “différence des droits”. Cette prise de position fragilise la fonction du Droit français puisqu’elle valorise une notion qu’il cherche à dissoudre dans le consept de Nation: la notion de “Minorité”
246: (…)la différence doit être conçue comme personnelle et non comme collective. Dans un système juridique fondé sur l’individualisme dériva de la conception des droits de l’homme, dans la perspective de l’Etat-Nation qui nivelle les disparités communautaires dans l’optique de l’Etat de droit qui a pour dimension fondamentale la garantie des droits de l’homme et la protection des citoyens contre l’arbitraire, appréhender la question de l’individualité par le biais de la notion de “minorité” ou de “communauté” est antinomique.
1. la distinction entre individu et minorité
Faire la référence à la notion de “minorité” réduit la problématique en ce que cette notion recouvre par elle-même la dimension sociétale des différence.(…) L’affirmation d’une “différence personnelle” ne peut se calquer sur la désignation de différences collectives. La différenciation entre les concepts de minorités et de différence individuelle est substantielle.
(…)La définition même du terme de “minorité” déclasse “l’homme” pour l’insérer dans un cadre social, dans un groupe qui s’en accaparerait: les minorités sont définies comme “des groupes non dominants de la population d’un Etat donné, groupes qui possèdent des caractéristiques ethniques, linguistiques et religieuses stables se différenciant nettement du reste de la population et désirant les conserver”. Comme il n’existe pas nécessairement de lien entre les notions de “minorité” (dans l’approche de la “minorité nationale”) et la notion de “peuple” (dans la reconnaissance du “droit à l’autodétermination des peuple”) les différents systèmes juridiques étatiques ont tendance à occulter les différenciations.
247: L’absence de reconnaissance juridique des minorités en France, qui fonde les “réserves” de la République envers les dispositions des différents Pactes et Conventions  internationaux qui s’y réfèrent, aboutit à ce que les droits des minorités se réduisent pour l’essentiel, à des droits pour leurs membres, dits alors les “minoritaires”: ce sont des droits individuels tels que le droit à la vie, le droit à la liberté religieuse, à l’usage de sa langue maternelle, lesquels sont prolongés par les libertés collectives corollaires, comme le droit de créer et d’entretenir des écoles privées au nom du principe fondamental de la liberté d’enseignement, ou le droit d’association et de réunion pacifique.

___1995. Penser les minorités en droit. In Le droit et les minorités – analyses et textes, edited by A. Fenet. Bruxelles: Bruylant.

___ 1998. La République Française face aux minorités: silences et réticences. Paper read at Quatrième colloque international du Centre international de la common law en français: Minorités et organisation de l’Etat, at Bruxelles.

___2000. Penser les Minorités en Droit. In Le Droit et les Minorités: analyses et textes, edited by A. Fenet, G. Koubi and I. Schulte-Tenckhoff. Bruxelles: Bruylant.

385: Une approche juridique de la notion de minorité ne peut, en effet, détenir de sens dans des régimes politiques et des montages juridiques bâtis sur des principes d’homogénéisation sociale. Elle répond, d’emblée, à la conception d’une société pluriculturelle, elle est aussi envisageable dans les différents Etats démocratiques dont les politiques juridiques développent des orientations multiculturalistes. La distinction entre société pluriculturelle et société multiculturelle est certes ténue mais substantielle pour envisager les problématiques de l’”identité démocratique”; elle suppose un ensemble de clarifications terminologiques dans le but de permettre le repérage des diverses modalités de coexistence institutionnelles de groupes de population ayant en commun une histoire particulière.

___2002. Traductions et Droit. Droit et Cultures 44:9-19.

9: (…) le terme de droit connaît divers sens que, par exemple, la langue anglaise semble discerner plus aisément, usant de morphèmes plus précis renvoyant aux lois, aux systèmes de droit ou aux droits individuels et collectifs des individus: law, legal system et rights.

___and Romy-Masliah, Daphné (eds.) (2012), S’entendre sur la langue (Droit et Cultures, 63; Paris: L’Harmattan) 200.

Entre écriture et oralité, les langues s’interpénètrent, puis s’emmêlent. Entre alphabet et grammaire, les langues se confrontent, s’affrontent, donnent à entendre leur diversité de tonalités et sonorités. Elles s’entrecroisent dans un espace où le droit n’est que langue du Pouvoir, langue écrite le plus souvent.
Tout État, pour asseoir sa puissance, pour dire « son » droit, choisit une langue ou bien désigne plusieurs langues comme « officielles » ou « nationales ». Cette posture permet de révéler certaines distorsions qui font que les locuteurs des langues non retenues comme telles sont conduits à faire de leurs langues soit un outil d’intégration sociale au risque de les décomposer, soit un instrument de résistance politique au risque de les marginaliser. Ainsi était-il indispensable de se saisir, en s’appuyant sur des observations sociolinguistiques, des qualités décernées aux langues dans toute leur pluralité – ici aux États-Unis, en Inde, en Malaisie, au Pérou, en Pologne et en Roumanie.
Sans doute, à travers les règles en vigueur dans le domaine de l’éducation, les langues régionales, les langues minoritaires, les langues autochtones semblent subir les assauts d’un libéralisme mondialisé qui défait la culture de sa dynamique sociétale. Mais, les configurations des mesures du savoir et de la connaissance peuvent être contournées par la force d’intégration ou, à l’inverse, d’opposition, que ces langues génèrent en d’autres formes de communication, entre sabir, jargon et argot – en un mot, la créativité.
S’entendre sur la langue c’est appréhender les phénomènes sociaux qui, captés par un système de droit, font que l’usage d’une langue peut être exclu de la sphère publique jusqu’à être interdit de facto de la sphère privée.
Les formes d’intercommunication indispensables à la cohésion sociale ont ainsi été mises en regard dans le dossier composant ce numéro de Droit et Cultures, retenant d’une part, les caractéristiques de la langue du droit face à celles de la langue de droit(s) et, d’autre part, les fonctions sociales d’une langue par rapport à son statut en droit.

___ and Romy-Masliah, Daphné (2012), ‘Présentation’, Droit et Cultures, 63 (S’entendre sur la langue), 11-22.

Faire de la langue un objet du droit relève d’une entreprise laborieuse tant les fonctions linguistiques ne s’inscrivent pas systématiquement dans un espace étatique, dans des frontières déterminées. La langue n’est pas en tous lieux considérée comme un attribut de l’État, elle n’est pas non plus un objet d’appropriation par quiconque, État, communauté ou individu .
Quand bien même la langue se trouverait de plus en souvent au centre de la construction nationale ou au cœur de certaines dispositions constitutionnelles dans un État donné, elle est un outil que les gouvernants affûtent au rythme des évolutions démographiques et suivant des compositions sociologiques qu’ils ont eux-mêmes préfigurées. De fait, « la gestion des langues par l’État, quelle qu’en soit la forme, a pour finalité essentielle de prendre en charge la diversité linguistique. Aucun espace politique n’est sociolinguistiquement homogène puisque, par exemple, les langues autochtones présentes sont multiples, et que les aires linguistiques et culturelles ne coïncident pas nécessairement avec les frontières politiques. »
Sans reprendre les questions un temps posées par Jocelyn Maclure, – à savoir : « Une communauté politique libérale, démocratique et pluraliste peut-elle conjuguer la promotion de la langue de la majorité et le respect de la diversité culturelle ? Politique linguistique et politique de la reconnaissance sont-elles compatibles ? » –, interrogations qui, dans l’objectif de la construction d’un espace communicationnel, n’ouvriraient que peu le débat sur la fonction de la langue et des langues, la problématique s’inscrit au centre d’une convergence entre science juridique, science politique et sociolinguistique . Le questionnement ne peut alors se limiter à l’analyse du rapport entre majorité et minorités culturelles dans les démocraties libérales contemporaines, ni se borner à une interrogation sur les mécanismes d’intégration sociale des immigrants au sein de ces sociétés.
En effet, plus que l’usage d’une ou de plusieurs langues, le pivot des études composant ce dossier que présente Droit et cultures, consiste à repérer à partir des qualifications juridiques données à chacune des langues par un État quelconque les moyens de s’entendre sur la langue…

– Les langues échappent aux définitions juridiques. Les quelques qualifications dont elles pourraient être dotées du fait de textes juridiques épars, constitutionnels ou législatifs, retraduisent plus sûrement des préoccupations politiques que des observations sociologiques.
Fernand de Varennes avait esquissé les premières lignes de cette mise en perspective en insistant sur le fait qu’« aucun État n’est neutre aujourd’hui en matière de langue. Dans tous les pays du monde, les gouvernements favorisent directement ou indirectement une langue, – quelle soit officielle ou non –, ou un nombre restreint de langues qui seront utilisés sur divers plans par les pouvoirs publics. » Pourtant, la qualité institutionnelle attribuée à une langue ou à plusieurs langue par les gouvernements en commande les usages, en prédétermine les fonctions, en conforte les prescriptions. En relatant les variations de statuts du yiddish entre reconnaissance officielle et reconnaissance sociale, Joshua Fishman extrait la quintessence des difficultés et des obstacles que rencontre toute langue qui, au-delà de sa nature profondément sociétale et communicationnelle, subit des transformations radicales de son ordonnancement dans un cadre politique donné . Il ne s’agit pas de retracer le passage d’une langue de l’oral à l’écrit, de saisir l’essence d’un parler ou de discerner la puissance de l’imprimer. L’un des enjeux spécifique est ainsi de comprendre comment une langue acquiert ou perd, suivant les propositions juridiques et sociologiques qui en sont élaborées, la qualité de langue officielle, puis comment une langue considérée officielle, même de manière partielle, se trouve soudain bannie de la sphère publique, jusqu’à être interdite dans la sphère privée.
Inscrivant ses analyses dans ce cadre particulier de la qualification politique et juridique d’une langue, Fernand de Varennes illustre sa réflexion en rendant compte des distanciations entre la langue conçue comme instrument de politique publique et la langue comprise comme un moyen de communication. Admettant que le choix d’une langue officielle relève de l’État, il note cependant que l’exercice du pouvoir étatique ne devrait pas conduire à porter atteinte aux normes juridiques relatives au respect des droits de l’homme. Il s’interroge ainsi sur les différentes modalités par lesquelles les législations relatives au choix d’une ou de quelques langue(s) officielle(s) peuvent exclure, voire même dans certains cas extrêmes, criminaliser l’utilisation d’une autre langue, minoritaire ou régionale. Néanmoins, les stratégies diffèrent lorsque les modalités de construction d’une langue s’attachent aux ressentiments persistants des déracinements imposés. Le discours juridique enferme la composition des pratiques linguistiques suivant des paramètres cartographiques qui peuvent conduire à exclure de l’analyse toutes les langues constituées par des formes de résistance active ou passive à l’aliénation, – ce que nous enseigne l’expérience linguistique des Afro-Américains .
Le fait d’imposer l’usage d’une langue officielle unique suscite des divisions tant sociales que politiques. Le déploiement d’un tel dispositif pourrait aller jusqu’à dévaloriser toute communication réalisée dans les sphères privées ou familiales, en langue maternelle ou dialectale, au risque de briser le lien que les locuteurs de ces langues entretiennent avec leur culture propre . La considération portée à la fonction communautaire, à l’espace privé ou à la sphère familiale, répond partiellement à une stratégie de fermeture d’une langue dans un contexte personnaliste, interne à une communauté ou propre au lignage ou à la parentèle. Ce resserrement, généralement imposé par les forces de domination octroyées à une langue dite nationale ou officielle, peut susciter un sentiment de perte d’identité culturelle . Reposant sur les stratégies inhérentes aux mesures éducatives en Malaisie, l’argumentation de Airil Hamil Mohd Adnan vient conforter cette vision d’un espace linguistique comprimé par les jeux d’ouverture d’une langue au monde de l’échange mercantiliste. Dans le domaine de l’éducation, plus que celui des langues régionales ou minoritaires, le statut des langues autochtones semble subir les assauts d’un libéralisme mondialisé qui tend à défaire la culture de sa dynamique sociétale . Dès lors qu’un système d’enseignement s’implique dans la mise en œuvre de bilans et de tests normalisés et standardisés, les enfants locuteurs des langues minoritaires ne peuvent que se trouver désavantagés par rapport à ceux qui pratiquent la langue nationale, officielle ou majoritaire. Les configurations des mesures du savoir et de la connaissance épousent les formes de la langue dominante, puisqu’elle est la langue qui participe au développement économique du pays et à la réalisation des échanges commerciaux. Aussi commun qu’en soit le constat, – la position hégémonique de la langue actuelle du marché, l’anglais, n’étant pourtant pas là en cause –, pour toute politique d’éducation, la situation que connaissent les locuteurs de ces langues autochtones ou indigènes doit pouvoir être appréhendée suivant deux temps dissociés : celui des enseignants, celui des enseignés.
Cet alignement pourrait reconstituer une des bases du modèle de la domination que Probal Dasgupta relève pour ce qui concerne les structurations sociales et linguistiques en Inde à propos des langues dites ‛moins répandues’ . En présentant les stratégies socio-économiques qui animent l’apprentissage des langues dominantes en Inde, Probal Dasgupta, par ailleurs président de l’Association mondiale d’espéranto, propose de reconstruire les relations linguistiques en inversant les processus étatiques. Dépasser la fonction traditionnelle du soutien à la langue locale qui fige les postures devient essentielle afin de redonner à chacun des groupes de locuteurs de ces langues ‛moins répandues’ les moyens d’une solidarité linguistique communautaire interlocale, jusqu’à évoquer la lingua franca, l’espéranto donc, comme facteur décisif dans la défense des droits de toutes les langues moins répandues.

– Résister au pouvoir d’imprégnation de la langue majoritaire et préserver les tournures de la langue minoritaire deviendrait une obligation morale, une exigence sociale et culturelle. Mais, même si les mots sont des armes, la revendication linguistique demeure de conséquence mesurée. De fait, le spectre de la sécession qui hante parfois les États modernes, notamment lors des reconstructions politiques dérivées du démantèlement de régimes autoritaires, ne se réalise pas à partir de la langue précédemment marginalisée, méprisée, opprimée, minorée.
Si les politiques linguistiques nationales se confrontent aux revendications régionales, dites parfois ‛ethnoterritoriales’ , elles peuvent les assurer d’une reconnaissance dont les implications restent mitigées ; en effet, elles n’en sont pas moins arcboutées sur le projet d’une unité sociale, d’une uniformisation de la langue politique, d’une normalisation de la langue administrative. La force d’une langue officielle, voire de plusieurs, réside ainsi dans le lien qu’elle tisse entre les institutions de pouvoir, dans les liaisons qu’elle suppose entre ces institutions et les citoyens de l’État concerné, appuyant la pression de la loi et articulant le poids du droit.
Néanmoins, les différenciations entre les espaces de locution n’obéissent pas aux mêmes trajectoires. Les quelques arguments qui ressortissent de la Charte européenne des langues régionales ou minoritaires de 1992 ne sont alors guère pertinents pour se saisir des politiques linguistiques mises en œuvre dans d’autres régions du monde. Certes, les définitions que cette Charte utilise peuvent servir d’appui aux normes juridiques comme aux analyses socio-juridiques, mais elles paraissent parfois décalées par rapport aux structurations sociales d’autres États, sous d’autres régimes politiques, avec d’autres espaces linguistiques comme, entre autres, la Russie , la Pologne , l’Inde , la Malaisie , le Pérou .
Ainsi par exemple, le terme de “langues régionales” qui concerne les langues « pratiquées traditionnellement sur un territoire d’un État par les ressortissants de cet État qui constituent un groupe numériquement inférieur au reste de la population de l’État », suscite quelques réserves dans la mesure où la notion de région ne s’entend pas toujours suivant les divisions politiques ou administratives d’un État, qu’elle peut outrepasser des frontières, voire même se développer par delà les mers.
En tant qu’une langue s’inscrit dans un univers communicationnel contrefait par la domination et la vitesse , les implications de la globalisation des échanges invitent au développement d’autres modèles répondant à des intérêts généraux, rejetant l’intercession d’intérêts particuliers et excluant toute prise en considération des sentiments individuels ou collectifs. La critique de la mondialisation se réalisant plus sûrement sur le plan culturel que sur le plan économique, toute langue autre que l’anglais en devient alors progressivement le pivot .
Sans s’inscrire directement dans le modèle de la critique des discours économiques retenus par Probal Dasgupta en Inde , c’est en faisant part des formes linguistiques de la rébellion des Noirs aux États-Unis que Renford Reese décrit les processus qui ont formé et forment encore la/les langue/s afro-américaine/s et les cultures, musicales surtout, qui les transportent. Remontant aux racines esclavagistes, il présente les différents modes d’expression forgés par les Africains-Américains comme un instrument de lutte contre l’hégémonie culturelle des États-Unis . D’une certaine manière, il confirme combien est prégnante l’option de la résistance communicationnelle née de la défiance permanente face aux difficultés d’intégration sociale.

– Moteur d’une unité sociale plus que politique, la langue se présente, souvent, sous le label national ou officiel, désignation qui reflète moins le choix des populations qu’une volonté politique institutionnelle, gouvernementale . Cette qualification revêt une fonction anastomotique qui répond à un principe de territorialité pourtant toujours incertain et marqué par l’histoire de la colonisation comme par les mouvements de migration. Un concept de spatialité s’avèrerait alors plus pertinent pour retraduire les tensions qu’une telle dénomination pourrait susciter dans un État donné. La notion d’aménagement linguistique le recouvre, contraignant les populations à s’adapter aux transmutations générées par la mondialisation et obligeant un remaniement des clefs pour la traduction des textes juridiques, notamment dans les espaces multilingues .
Puisque, classiquement, une politique linguistique concerne nécessairement « les fonctionnements socioculturels de telle langue, son statut, son territoire, face aux fonctionnements socioculturels, au(x) statut(s), au(x) territoire(s) d’une autre/d’autres langue(s) également en usage dans la même communauté, avec des cas de figures variables (complémentarité, concurrence, domination, etc.) » , elle dispose également des modes de déplacement et des formes d’installation des locuteurs de ces langues. A ce titre, la dissociation entre langue officielle et langue nationale peut être reconstituée autour des phénomènes sociaux et juridiques, émancipant la sociolinguistique en l’assurant d’un champ d’investigation hors normes.
Qualifiée d’officielle, la langue s’entend pour propager la voix de l’État, pour diffuser le discours des gouvernants, pour asseoir la parole du droit. Elle dispose l’autorité institutionnelle, elle l’assure d’une force directionnelle en tant qu’elle est la voie par laquelle sont déterminées les politiques publiques, les actions administratives, les modélisations pénales. Dite nationale, la langue se referme sur des locuteurs unis par un lien d’allégeance à un État, une nation, une patrie. Comme le signifie Joshua Fischman, elle permet une délimitation d’un espace, elle trace une frontière invisible certes, mais que certains auteurs désigneraient sous une forme sociétale ou ethnique, se départissant ainsi des inflexions gouvernementales politiques ou juridiques . Toutefois, par delà les remarques exposées par Fernand de Varennes , une langue peut être qualifiée nationale ou officielle sans nécessairement exclure du terrain sociétal d’autres parlers, langues régionales ou langues minoritaires, dialectes ou jargons, et, plus sûrement, sans porter atteinte au droit au respect de la vie privée.
Ces positionnements permettent de percevoir les formes par lesquelles sont déterminées les qualités régionales ou minoritaires ou les propriétés indigènes ou autochtones , des différentes langues en usage dans un espace donné. Suivant cette orientation, la fonction productive du territoire, évoquée dans le cadre d’un État, reprend de la vigueur. Sont alors pris en considération l’antériorité de l’implantation des populations concernées ainsi que les mécanismes d’installation et d’ancrage localisés des populations locutrices d’une de ces langues au sein de cet État. Quelquefois, l’interférence des législations peut susciter des agencements particuliers qui détachent la langue régionale ou autochtone de l’espace territorial sur lequel elle s’est instituée ou, au contraire, qui rattachent une langue minoritaire à un espace territorial dans lequel elle ne dispose pas de racines spécifiques.
Ainsi, Michael Hornsby et Tomasz Wicherkiewicz s’interrogent sur la différenciation entre langue régionale et langue minoritaire ; cette distanciation se reflète, en Pologne, dans le traitement juridique que l’une ou l’autre connaît. En quelques détours, confirmant les appréciations précédentes, Michael Hornsby and Tomasz Wicherkiewicz dévoilent ainsi, implicitement peut-être, quelle est l’influence des qualifications juridiques sur le statut des langues plus ou moins reconnues dans un espace étatique donné. Certes, ces perceptions ne rendent pas directement compte de la situation des locuteurs au sein d’une société donnée ; pourtant, qu’ils soient monolingues, bilingues ou multilingues, ce sont ces locuteurs qui font vivre une langue.
Pour leur part, Alexandra Eftimie et Oana Macovei s’attachent surtout aux textes juridiques intervenus en la matière en Roumanie. Alexandra Eftimie et Oana Macovei retiennent alors les schémas d’une appartenance à une minorité linguistique afin de retracer les compositions normatives des rapports entre langue nationale et langue minoritaire . Cependant, les dissociations opérées entre langues véhiculaires et langues vernaculaires, entre langues officielles et langues parlées, entre langues nationales et langues minoritaires, etc., ne permettent pas de se saisir directement des particularités sociales. Les textes juridiques qui y sont associés assèchent leurs modes de perception : les normes relatives à la protection des langues autres que nationales ou officielles surpassent les normes relatives à la protection des droits des locuteurs de ces langues.
Comme le fait Airil Haimi Mohd Adnan , mais en ne s’attachant pas exclusivement aux méthodes d’enseignement en vigueur en Inde, c’est à ces derniers que s’intéresse Probal Dasgupta quand il relève la tension entre langues régionales et langues minoritaires. Ces deux groupes de langues doivent être dissociés. Les langues minoritaires sont saisies sous le label de langues autochtones et classifiées comme « langues moins répandues » en Inde notamment. Elles affrontent deux circuits de domination linguistique : les langues régionales et les langues nationales. Les langues que l’on pourrait penser ‛régionales’ et qui subissent la domination d’un hindi ou d’un anglais, sont elles-mêmes hégémoniques au niveau provincial ; dès lors, les langues autochtones que parlent les peuples indigènes se trouvent marginalisées. Ses analyses permettent de repérer le lien indéfectible entre politiques linguistiques et discours économiques, signifiant ainsi combien les stratégies étatiques inscrivent leurs actions entre approches compassionnelles, destinées à pacifier les relations sociales, et considérations compétitives, dans un ordre économique mondialisé. Les langues régionales, minoritaires ou autochtones sont alors appréhendées en termes de biens et de besoins et les mesures politiques et juridiques qui les concernent obéissent à une échelle quantitative d’entrée dans la post-modernité.
S’inscrivant sur ce terrain des langues indigènes, Myryam Yataco, de son côté, délivre des informations substantielles sur les modalités d’appréhension juridique des langues indigènes dans un État qui, à l’occasion d’une récente restructuration politique et sociale nuancée, s’est doté d’une nouvelle constitution afin d’intégrer, d’une façon mesurée certes, les populations autochtones . Cependant, la perspective du développement économique est de tonalité permanente dans un espace mondialisé ; elle grève les modalités juridiques de reconnaissance pratique de ces langues. La visibilité qui peut leur être accordée est ainsi essentiellement resserrée autour de la spécificité des populations concernées sans tenir compte des périmètres géographiques qui, pourtant, devraient être au cœur des analyses sociales et politiques. En quelque sorte, confirmant les analyses menées par les linguistes tels que Claude Hagège ou Jean Calvet, ces approches insérées dans l’espace d’un droit aux accents économiques prononcés, rendent compte du fait que les problématiques de la reconnaissance des langues ne rejoignent qu’imparfaitement celles de la reconnaissance des peuples.

– Cette conception d’une langue engoncée dans les espaces économiques est soutenue par le concept d’aménagement linguistique. Car ce concept « a été élaboré dans le contexte plus grand du développement global et plus particulièrement dans la perspective de la prise en considération du caractère culturel et linguistique du développement. Ce caractère culturel du développement tient au rôle que jouent les langues dans un ensemble d’activités qui ont en commun leur utilisation comme outil d’appréhension et de dénomination du réel, comme outil d’élaboration et de transfert des connaissances, comme outil de communication, comme média de coopération technique et économique et comme vecteur de plus-value dans une économie de la connaissance, et, de manière plus générale, dans le développement social et économique des communautés linguistiques. »
Ainsi, quel que soit le modèle retenu, de l’unilinguisme d’Etat associé ou non à un multilinguisme social jusqu’au multilinguisme officiel reconnaissant ou non l’usage d’autres langues vernaculaires, évoquer un « droit de la langue » ne retrace guère les formes de compréhension intermutuelles indispensables à la cohésion sociale, ni à la constitution d’un monde global. Le schéma de l’intercommunication apparaît alors plus pertinent pour rendre compte des variations qu’un droit de la langue peut introduire au sein d’une société donnée. Dans ce cadre, un droit de la langue peut autant signifier l’existence de formes grammaticales imposées, sous la forme d’une normalisation sociolinguistique officielle, comme ce fut le cas du catalan en Espagne, ou un ensemble de prescriptions orthographiques et de fonctionnements lexicaux ou phonétiques, comme les pays lusophones l’ont mis en œuvre ces dernières années, que révéler une préoccupation politique quant à l’usage d’une ou de plusieurs langues tant dans les circuits administratifs que dans les espaces commerciaux.
Dès lors, il semblerait bien que pour composer les moyens de s’entendre sur la langue, doivent être mis en regard d’une part, tant les caractéristiques de la langue du droit que celles de la langue de droit, de droit personnel (privé ou familial) ou de droit collectif (national, régional ou minoritaire) et d’autre part, tant les fonctions sociales d’une langue par rapport à son statut de droit que les fonctions politiques de cette langue par rapport à sa qualité sociétale. Ce que propose, un tant soit peu, ce dossier…
Références (sélection)

Bourdieu P., 1982, Ce que parler veut dire, Paris, Fayard.
Calvet L.-J., 1987, La guerre des langues et les politiques linguistiques, Paris, Payot.
Calvet L.-J., 2002, Le marché aux langues, Paris, Plon.
Clairis C. (éd.), 2010, Variétés et enjeux du plurilinguisme, Paris, L’Harmattan.
Derrida J., 1996, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, Paris, Galilée.
Fishman J. A., 1991, Reversing Language Shift. Theorical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages, Cleveland-Philadelphia-Adelaïde, Multilingual Matters.
Guillorel H. et Koubi G. (éd.), 1999, Langues et droit, Bruxelles, Bruylant.
Kymlicka, W., 1995, Multicultural Citizenship. Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Labov W., 1976, Sociolinguistique, Paris, Minuit.
Lacorne D. et Judt T. (éd.), 2002, La politique de Babel. Du monolinguisme d’État au plurilinguisme des peuples, Karthala
Ly N. (éd.), 2009, Plurilinguismes et multiculturalismes, PU Bordeaux.
Ninyoles R. L., 1975, Estructura social y política lingüística, València, Fernando Torres.
Romy-Masliah, D., 2000, L’Anglais et les Cultures: Analyse Sociolinguistique des Situations Plurilingues et Multiculturelles au Canada, en Australie et aux États-Unis. Lille, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion.
Vallverdú F., 1993, « Sobre el capgirament de la substitució lingüística. Un suggestiu estudi de Joshua A. Fishman », Treballs de sociolingüística catalana, n° 11, p. 17-18.
A. Viaut (éd.), 2007, Variables territoriales et promotion des langues minoritaires, Bordeaux, MSH d’Aquitaine.
Woehrling J.-M., 2005, La Charte européenne des langues régionales ou minoritaires. Un commentaire analytique, Strasbourg, Conseil de l’Europe.

Sommaire

Geneviève Koubi et Daphné Romy-Masliah, « S’entendre sur la langue… »

J. Fishman, « Etats du yiddish : les différents types de reconnaissance gouvernementale ou non gouvernementale » ; « Varieties of governmental ant non-governmental recognitions of Yiddish ».

F. de Varennes, « Langues officielles versus droits linguistiques : l’un exclut-il l’autre ? »

M. Hornsby et T. Wicherkiewicz, « Être ou ne pas être (une minorité)? Le kachoube en Pologne »

Airil H. M. Adnan, « Perdre sa langue, perdre son identité, se perdre. Le cas des enfants aborigènes Orang Asli de Malaisie »

M. Yataco, « Las políticas de estado y la exclusión de las lenguas indígenas en el Perú ».

P. Dasgupta, « La politique linguistique et les langues indiennes moins répandues ».

A. Eftimie et O. Macovei, « Protection des locuteurs et protection des langues minoritaires ou régionales en Roumanie ».

R. Reese, « Les manifestations linguistiques de l’oppression: L’expérience des Afro-Américains.»

Kourouma, Ahmadou. 2000. Allah n’est pas obligé. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

p. 53: Quand on dit qu’il y a guerre tribale dans un pays, ça signifie que des bandits de grand chemin se sont partagé le pays. il se sont partagé la richesse; ils se sont partagé le territoire; ils se sont sont partagé les hommes. Ils se sont partagé tout et tout et le monde entier les laisse faire: Tout le monde les laisse tuer librement les innocents, les enfants et les femmes.

Kozhemyakov, Alexey (2013), ‘Overview of Council of Europe’s actions regarding Linguistic Rights and Minorities’, paper given at Roundtable on linguistic rights, UNOG.

Head of the Department, National Minorities and Antidiscrimination/ Head of Secretariat of the European Charter for Regional or Minority languages, Council of Europe Secretariat of Regional Charter of minority languages. How legally binding is it? Council of Europe is protecting minority languages: 3 monitoring bodies, Commission on Racism and Intolerance, National Minorities and Antidiscrimination, European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages: Art. 7.2, but possibility to ameliorate services.
Active measures for state to protect and promote minority languages. Charter complements individual rights of minority language speakers. Charter based on reality and historical data. 25 state party used by 206 linguistic minority groups. Summary of charter achievement in UNESCO Journal, but one feature missing: languages of migrants cannot be protected under the charter. NGO of minorities are active and instrumental in our ongoing consultation on language practices. Charter provides teaching of history and culture of language minorities.
Acheivement: recognition by member states, revitalisation of nearly extinct langugages, UK Cornish, Cyprus arabic, new legislations or institutional arrangmeent in judicial authorities etc. Charter is open for non-european states.
States rather than speakers…difference between defending the language, the community or the individuals???
starting point of the conventions: The Charter from Congress of minority speakers of council of Europe. cf. Rob Dunbar’s work on the issue!!!
two Conventions are addressing the same body of people charter was beyond minority protection and antidiscrimination.
About France: we are monitoring the recent development in France where Hollande promised to ratify the charter. We organised two events in Strasbourg and Bayonne giving ground for large discussions in the recent past. We cooperate with French NGOs, especially in Alsace, but that’s an ongoing process.
Conflict prevention is the main concern of the Charter. By principle we do not comment on minority languages in political terms.
No precedent in non-European states to ratify, but still the country has to deal with mirror approach.

Kristeva. 1981. Le langage, cet inconnu. 2ème ed. Vol. 125, Points Essais. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

Kristof, Nicholas D. and WuDunn, Sheryl (2010), La Moitié du Ciel: Enquête sur des femmes extraordinaires qui combattent l’oppression., trans. Olivier Collette (Paris: Les Arènes).

22: Au début des années 1990, les Nations unies et la Banque mondiale commencèrent à prendre conscience du potentiel représenté par les femmes et les filles. “Investir dans l’éducation des filles pourrait bien être le placement le plus rentable du monde en voie de développement” écrivait Lawrence Summer à l’époque ou il occupait le poste de chef économiste de la Banque mondiale. “La question n’est pas de savoir si les pays peuvent se permettre cet investissement, mais s’ils peuvent se permettre de ne pas éduquer davantage de filles. En 2001, une étude très remarquée de la banque mondiale,(Mason, Andrew D and King, Elizabeth M (2001), ‘Genre et développement économique : vers l’égalite des sexes dans les droits, les ressources et la participation’, A World Bank policy research report (Washington, D.C.: World Bank).) soutenait que promouvoir l’égalité des sexes était un élément crucial de la lutte contre la pauvreté mondiale.
(…). Les plus grands spécialistes du développement et de la santé publique -y compris Sen et Summers, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs et le Dr Paul Farmer – enjoignent les pays à se montrer beaucoup plus attentifs au rôle des femmes.

77, Chapitre 3: Apprendre à se faire entendre. Commence par la traduction de la citation de Shaw, George Bernard (1903), Man and Superman: The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
80: Selon des habitants du bidonville, Akku Yadav aurait violé une femme juste après son mariage. Un jour, il aurait déshabillé un homme, lui aurait infligé des brûlures de cigarette avant de l’obliger à danser nu devant sa fille de 16 ans (…).
25 familles quittèrent Kasturb Nagar, mais la plupart des Dalit n’avaient pas le choix. Ils s’adaptèrent en retirant leurs filles des écoles et en les bouclant dans les maisons, où elles n’étaient visibles de personne. Les vendeurs de légumes évitaient Kasturba Nagar, si bien que les mères de familles devaient parcourir de longes distances à pied pour s’approvisionner aux marchés. Mais, tant que Akku Yadav ne s’en prenait qu’aux Dalits, les autorités n’intervenaient pas.(…)
Un jour, une femme venue dénoncer un viol commis par Akku Yadav et sa bande fut effectivement violée par les policiers.(…)
83: “Pardonnez-moi, hurla-t-il soudain pris de terreur. Pardonnez-moi! Je ne le ferai plus.” Mais les femmes se passaient les couteaux et continuaient à frapper. Chacune était convenue de le poignarder au moins une fois. Puis, déterminées à venger Asho Bhagat, à qui il avait coupé les seins, elles tranchèrent le pénis d’Akku Yadav. Lorsque’lles en eurent fini avec lui, ce n’était plus que de la chair à pâté. Le jours où nous sommes passés à la salle d’audience, elle était toujours maculée de sang. (…)
Les centaines de femmes du bidonville décidèrent alors qu’aucune d’elles ne pourrait être déclarée coupble si toutes revendiquaient le meurtre
107: L’école de Mukhtar.
Mukhtar a grandi à Meerwala, un village du sud du Pendjab, au sein d’une famille de paysans. (…)En juillet 2002, Shakur, son frère cadet, fut kidnappé et violé par plusieurs membres d’un clan plus important, les Mastoi (Au Pakistan, le viol de garçons par des hétérosexuels n’est pas rare et est moins stigmatisé que celui des filles). (…) Craignant d’être sanctionnés, ses agresseurs refusèrent de le libérer et justifièrent leur crime en l’accusant à tort d’avoir eu des rapports sexuels avec l’une des leurs, une jeune fille prénommée Salma.

Kroch, Antony, and William Labov. 1972. Resolution in Response to Arthur Jensen (1969). Linguistic Society of America Bulletin:17-18.

The writings of Arthur Jensen which argue that many lower class people are born with and inferior type of intelligence contain unfounded claims which are harmful to many members of our society. Jensen and others have introduced into the arena of pub lic debate the theory that the population of the United States is deivded by genetic inheritance into two levels of intellectual ability: one defined by the ability to form concepts freely, the other limited in this area and confined primarily to the association of ideas.
Because this therory, if accepted, would necessarily alter deucational policy and seroulsy affect the lives of many of our fellow citizens, and because linguists are familiar with a large body of evidence which bears on the question, the Linguistic Society of America issues the following statement and resolution, representing the considered professional opinion of scientific linguists. The following conclusions are based on facts generally know to linguists:
1- by an early age, children learn without direct instruction, on the basis of the speech that they hear, the largest part of the grammar of their native language.This grammar is the knowledge of a hierarchically structured set of relations, used by the speaker to produce and understand an unlimited number of siple and c omplex sentences.
2- No one language or dialect, standard or nonstandard, is known to be significantly more complex than another in its basic grammatical apparatus. Linguists have not yet discovered any speech community with a native language that can be described as conceptually or logically primitive, inadequate or deficient.
3- The nonstandard dialects of English spoken by lower class families in the inner cities of the United States are fully formed languages with all of the grammatical structure necessary for logical thought. Statements to the contrary by some edcucational psychologists are misinterpretations of superficial differences in the means of expresson between these dialects and standard English.
4- No theory yet developed by linguistis or psychologists can account satisfactorily for children’s language learning ability. It is generally agreed that the mere association of ideas is not sufficient. The minimal ability necessary to learn and to speak any human language includes native skills of much higher order of magnitude than those used in the laboratory tests offered in evidence for Dr. Jensen’s vew.

On the basis of these generally recognized conclusions of linguistic investigation, linguists agree that all children who have learned to speak a human language have a capacity for concept formation beyond our present power to analyze; that language learning abilities indicate that the nature and range of human intelligence is not yet understood or well-emasured by any current testing procedure; that tests which may have some value in predicting later performance in school should not be interpreted as measures of intelligence in any theoretically coherent sense of the word; that to attribute a limited level of “associational intelligence” to a sizeable sectgion of our population is a serious misconception of the nature of human intelligence.

Kukathas, Chandran. (1992), ‘Are there cultural rights?’ Political Theory, 1 (20), 105-39.

___(ed.), (1993.), Multicultural citizens: the philosophy and politics of identity (St. Leonard’s: Center for Independent Study).

Kymlicka, Will. 1989. Liberalism, Community and Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
—–1995. Multicultural Citizenship. Edited by D. Miller and A. Ryan, Oxford Political Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Kymlicka, Will, ed. 1995. The Rights of Minority Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 387

145: Des sondages d’opinion montrent que, bien loin de s’opposer aux principes libéraux, les minorités ne se distinguent pas des majorités d’un point  de vue statistique dans leur attachement à ces principes. Cela est certainement vrai s’agissant des minorités nationales: les valeurs poliques des minorités catalane, écossaise ou québécoise sont qualisment identiques à celles des majorités espagnole, anglaise ou canadienne. De même les pupulations noire et blanche aux Etats-Unis partagent les mêmes principes politiques et manifestent le même engagement à l’égard de la Constitution et du Bill of Rights.

Kymlicka, Will. 1999. Theorizing Indigenous Rights. University of Toronto Law Journal:281-93.

Since 1989 we have witnessed a proliferation of efforts to develop international norms of the rights of ethnocultural minorities, such as the UN’s 1992 Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, the Council of Europe’s 1995 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, and the Organization of American States’ 1997 draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This activity at the level of international law is reflected in a comparable explosion of interest in minority rights among normative political theorists. In this context, Michael Walzer’s work occupies an important but somewhat anomalous role. On the one hand, he was arguably the first political theorist, at least in the postwar era, to take seriously the issue of minority rights. Nonetheless, Walzer’s work has had surprisingly little enduring impact on multiculturalism debates in either academic political theory or international law. One explanation for this puzzle is that Walzer’s substantive discussion of minority rights seems to sit uneasily with his more foundational theory of justice, laid out in Spheres of Justice. I want to suggest a distinct (but complementary) explanation for why Walzer’s work has not permeated the debate, focusing less on metaethical worries about his account of common meanings, and more on the practicalities of how he categorizes ethnic diversity. Walzer’s state-differentiated but minority-undifferentiated approach simply does not connect to the governing premises of the larger academic and public debate, which treat minorities as differentiated and states as undifferentiated. I believe it is Walzer’s idiosyncratic approach to categorization more than his controversial theory of justice-as-common-meanings which explains his relatively marginal role in the multiculturalism debate.

This article will also be published in Yitzhak Benbaji and Naomi Sussmann, eds., Reading Walzer: Sovereignty, Culture, and Justice (London: Routledge, forthcoming). Thanks to Yitzhak and Naomi, and to the editors and reviewers of Ethics & International Affairs, for their helpful suggestions.

ABSTRACT Since 1989 we have witnessed a proliferation of efforts to develop international norms of the rights of ethnocultural minorities, such as the UN’s 1992 Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, the Council of Europe’s 1995 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, and the Organization of American States’ 1997 draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This activity at the level of international law is reflected in a comparable explosion of interest in minority rights among normative political theorists. In this context, Michael Walzer’s work occupies an important but somewhat anomalous role. On the one hand, he was arguably the first political theorist, at least in the postwar era, to take seriously the issue of minority rights. Nonetheless, Walzer’s work has had surprisingly little enduring impact on multiculturalism debates in either academic political theory or international law. One explanation for this puzzle is that Walzer’s substantive discussion of minority rights seems to sit uneasily with his more foundational theory of justice, laid out in Spheres of Justice. I want to suggest a distinct (but complementary) explanation for why Walzer’s work has not permeated the debate, focusing less on metaethical worries about his account of common meanings, and more on the practicalities of how he categorizes ethnic diversity. Walzer’s state-differentiated but minority-undifferentiated approach simply does not connect to the governing premises of the larger academic and public debate, which treat minorities as differentiated and states as undifferentiated. I believe it is Walzer’s idiosyncratic approach to categorization—more than his controversial theory of justice-as-common-meanings—which explains his relatively marginal role in the multiculturalism debate. DIGITAL OBJECT IDENTIFIER (DOI) 10.1111/j.1747-7093.2009.00229.x About DOI ARTICLE TEXT Since 1989 we have witnessed a proliferation of efforts to develop international norms of the rights of ethnocultural minorities, such as the UN’s 1992 Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, the Council of Europe’s 1995 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, and the Organization of American States’ 1997 draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.1 This activity at the level of international law is reflected in a comparable explosion of interest in minority rights among normative political theorists. In the same twenty-year period we have seen a proliferation of attempts at formulating a normative theory of minority rights and examining how minority rights relate to broader political values (such as freedom, equality, democracy, and citizenship) and broader normative frameworks (such as liberalism, communitarianism, and republicanism). Key works here include those by Charles Taylor, Jim Tully, Iris Young, Jeff Spinner-Halev, Bhikhu Parekh, Yael Tamir, Joseph Carens, Susan Okin, and Anne Phillips—a rich literature that has informed and inspired my own work in the field.2 In this context, Michael Walzer’s work occupies an important but somewhat anomalous role. On the one hand, he was arguably the first political theorist, at least in the postwar era, to take seriously the issue of minority rights. He wrote two groundbreaking articles in 1982 and 1983—”Pluralism in Political Perspective” and “States and Minorities”—which are remarkable for their prescience. They lay out virtually all of the relevant normative and theoretical issues in a clear and concise way, several years before minority rights became a hot topic in academia or, indeed, in policy circles. And he has continued to develop these ideas over time, including in his important 1997 book, On Toleration, which refines and deepens his account of the basic framework within which to theorize state-minority relations—a framework initially developed in his 1983 article. The resulting corpus of work is among the most intellectually sophisticated available, combining (as does all his work) profound moral reflections with an impressive historical and geographical reach. Nonetheless, Walzer’s work has had surprisingly little enduring impact on multiculturalism debates in either academic political theory or international law. Whereas his work on just and unjust wars dominates the field, his work on minority rights has “more or less disappeared from view.”3 Two forms of differentiation One explanation for this puzzle is that Walzer’s substantive discussion of minority rights seems to sit uneasily with his more foundational theory of justice, laid out in Spheres of Justice. In the latter, Walzer seems to presuppose a high degree of cultural homogeneity within states. His theory of justice requires that social goods be distributed according to their “common meanings” within a society, and this in turn seems to require a fairly thick shared culture among citizens. In a much-cited (and much-criticized) passage, Walzer writes that: “The political community is probably the closest we can come to a world of common meanings. Language, history, and culture come together (come more closely together than anywhere else) to produce a collective consciousness.”4 Passages such as this one seem to render the phenomenon of ethnically divided societies invisible. If one of the core presuppositions of a theory of justice is that citizens share a “language, history, and culture,” then the question of how to justly treat those with a different language, history, and culture cannot arise, except as an afterthought or anomaly. Since most theorists (and policy-makers) working on minority rights start from the opposite premise—namely, that language, history, and culture do not come together in a political community—they have looked elsewhere for their theoretical tools. I will not rehearse that familiar critique here, in part because it is covered in a recent paper by Jacob Levy.5 Instead, I want to suggest a distinct (but complementary) explanation for why Walzer’s work has not permeated the debate, focusing less on metaethical worries about his account of common meanings, and more on the practicalities of how he categorizes ethnic diversity. One of the crucial tasks of any theory of minority rights is to bring some conceptual order to the dizzying array of state-minority relations around the world. There is enormous variation between states as to how they treat their minorities; and indeed enormous variation within states, as different types of minorities are accorded different kinds of rights, powers, or accommodations from the state. Given this complexity, it seems unlikely that any single formula or model will apply to all minorities at all times. Yet if we are to make progress, theoretically or practically, we need to be able to make some types of generalizations, identifying at least certain common patterns or dynamics of state-minority relations, and trying to make sense of their underlying normative logic. All of us who work in this field struggle with this issue of generalization and categorization. To oversimplify, we can distinguish two broad ways of theorizing minority rights. One option (the one I have pursued) is to develop a typology of different types of ethnocultural groups, and to formulate the rights appropriate to each type of group—for example, one set of norms for indigenous peoples, such as the Maori or American Indians (including rights to self-government, customary law, and land claims); one set of norms for regionally concentrated national minorities, such as the Catalans or Québécois (including rights to territorial autonomy and official language status); one set of norms for immigrants and refugees (including rights to naturalization and reasonable accommodations); and so on. On this view, groups legitimately vary in their minority rights—for example, national minorities and indigenous peoples might have language rights that immigrant groups do not have—but wherever each of these types of minorities exists, the state has a duty to accord them their distinctive rights. Another option (the one pursued by Walzer) is to develop a typology of different types of states, and to formulate the norms that each type of state should respect—for example, a traditional nation-state, such as France, can adopt one set of laws or policies toward cultural diversity, which would legitimately differ from those that are appropriate for a post-ethnic multination state, a federation, a consociational state, or an empire. On this second view, whether an ethnocultural group has a right to official language status would depend not on the type of group it is (for example, national minority versus immigrant group), but on the type of state it finds itself in. A traditional nation-state built around a core ethnonational group might have different duties in relation to minority languages, both for its immigrants and national minorities, than a post-ethnic state that defines itself in nonethnic terms. In short, we can either have a group-differentiated theory of minority rights or a state-differentiated theory of minority rights. The former focuses on categorizing the different types of groups, each of which is seen as having a distinctive logic of legitimate claims-making, while ignoring or downplaying the relevance of differences between types of states. No matter what type of state they find themselves in, specific types of minorities are seen as having an intrinsic tendency, and legitimate right, to make certain types of claims, and all states are seen as having the same obligations toward the relevant categories of minorities. The state-differentiated approach, by contrast, focuses on categorizing different types of states, each of which is seen as having distinctive legitimate approaches to its internal diversity, while downplaying the relevance of group differences within each state. Each type of state is seen as having a distinctive but coherent logic toward diversity, which it appropriately applies to all its substate groups, whether immigrant, regional national minority, or indigenous people. The Logic of Group Differentiation These are obviously ideal types. In reality, most theorists and practitioners invariably end up deploying some combination of the group-differentiated and the state-differentiated approaches. There are just too many differences both among minorities and among states to rely exclusively on one approach alone. However, most people do fall clearly on one side of this fault line, with the vast majority of both academic theorists and practitioners endorsing the group-differentiated approach. If one picks up any of the major texts on theories of multiculturalism and minority rights, one is likely to find that the discussion is organized around a typology of groups. The precise typology differs from author to author, depending on their particular interests or geographical focus, but one typically finds a chapter on immigrants, a chapter on indigenous peoples, a chapter on regional national(ist) groups, a chapter on isolationalist ethnoreligious groups (such as the Amish), a chapter on African Americans as a historically enslaved group, and so on.6 The goal in each case is to articulate the normative basis of each group’s claims against the state, where the state is understood in generic terms as a “Western liberal democracy,” with the assumption that all Western states—indeed all states that think of themselves as members in good standing of the family of democracies—should operate with similar criteria and principles in evaluating these claims. This predilection for group-based typologies rests on a number of assumptions that are not always made explicit. I would highlight three such assumptions. First, it assumes what Charles Taylor calls “deep diversity”—namely, the assumption that different types of groups within each state (legitimately) stand in different relations to the larger state. Different types of groups want to belong to the state in different ways, and to exercise different forms of citizenship. In the Canadian case, writes Taylor: To build a country for everyone, Canada would have to allow for second-level or “deep” diversity, in which a plurality of ways of belonging would be acknowledged or accepted. Someone of, say, Italian extraction in Toronto or Ukrainian extraction in Edmonton might indeed feel Canadian as a bearer of individual rights in a multicultural mosaic. His or her belonging would not “pass through” some other community, although the ethnic identity might be important to him or her in various ways. But this person might nevertheless accept that a Quebecois or a Cree or a Dene might belong in a very different way, that these persons were Canadian through being members of their national communities. Reciprocally, the Quebecois, Cree or Dene would accept the perfect legitimacy of the “mosaic” identity.7 Let us call this the assumption of intrastate deep diversity in claims-making. While this passage is framed in reference to Canada, defenders of the group-differentiated approach typically assume—and this is the second key assumption—that this sort of deep diversity arises from, and reflects, the enduring nature of particular types of ethnocultural groups, and hence emerges wherever group members are free to express their identities and aspirations. Given this assumption, any society that allows for the free expression and mobilization of ethnocultural identities—that is to say, any liberal democracy—is likely to witness similar patterns of deep diversity. In any free and democratic society, we should expect to find that indigenous peoples and national minorities seek to belong to the state in a different way from immigrant and refugee groups, with the former seeking forms of territorial autonomy, language rights, and institutional completeness not sought by immigrant groups. Let us call this the assumption of cross-national consistency in claims-making. Finally, it is assumed that any liberal-democratic state should use similar criteria in evaluating these claims, such as principles of individual freedom, social justice (both distributive justice and rectificatory justice), and effective democratic participation. It is these “nationally anonymous” liberal-democratic criteria, rather than nationally-specific narratives or self-understandings, that should determine the normative evaluation of minority claims.8 It may well be that some of these group-differentiated claims pose a significant challenge to the self-understandings of particular Western states. Such countries as Germany that have conceived of themselves as ethnic nations may have trouble accepting the naturalization and accommodation of certain immigrant groups, such as the Turks. Such countries as the United States that have conceived of themselves as voluntary associations of freely consenting individuals may have trouble accepting claims to self-government by historically incorporated national groups, such as American Indians or Puerto Ricans. But national self-understandings are not self-justifying: to reject minority claims that comply with the requirements of core liberal-democratic values simply because they conflict with national mythologies or narratives would be fundamentally illiberal and undemocratic. Let us call this the assumption of uniformity in normative criteria. If we start from these three assumptions, then something like the group-differentiated approach more or less follows naturally. If we assume that different types of groups typically seek different types of rights (whenever they are free to do so), and that these typological differences are stable across (democratic) countries, and that all (democratic) countries should apply the same “nationally anonymous” criteria in evaluating these claims, then a political theory of minority rights is virtually destined to take the form of group-differentiated rights that are applicable to all (democratic) states. In short, minorities are differentiated, states are undifferentiated.9 Of course, all three of these assumptions can be questioned. Indeed, some critics have argued that the tendency of political theorists to develop such group-differentiated theories of minority rights depends on “essentialist” and “reified” understandings of ethnocultural groups. Indigenous groups, for example, do not have an inherent “telos” that means they are somehow naturally or inevitably destined to claim land rights and self-government rights. Similarly, there is no “essence” to national minorities that predestines them to demand regional autonomy and official language status, and no essence to immigrant groups that predestines them to demand naturalization and ethnocultural accommodation. The tendency of political theorists to rely on such essentialist assumptions about typological differences is often said to reflect their ignorance of the findings of sociology and anthropology, which reveal the contingent, contested, and strategic nature of these political claims.10 And yet this predilection for a group-differentiated approach is not just found among academic political theorists. On the contrary, it seems to be the preferred approach among international lawyers as well. As noted earlier, we have witnessed a veritable explosion of new international conventions and declarations on minority rights that also rely on a group-differentiated approach. For example, within the European context (where international minority rights norms are most developed), there are separate international legal instruments or policy directives targeted at (a) indigenous peoples, (b) national minorities, (c) migrant workers, and (d) the Roma.11 In each case, we see the same threefold set of assumptions that underpin recent political theories of minority rights: namely, (1) that these types of groups typically each raise different sorts of claims, and so should be dealt with separately (intrastate deep diversity in claims-making); (2) that these typological differences are stable across the Western democracies (cross-national consistency in claims-making); and (3) that liberal democracies can and should apply common standards in evaluating these claims (uniformity in normative criteria). Of course, it is possible that international lawyers are also in the thrall of essentialist assumptions about ethnocultural groups, and that critique too has been made.12 But we can also find a similar reliance on group-differentiated typologies among the most sophisticated empirical investigators of state-minority relations. For example, the most systematic cross-national study of state-minority relations, Ted Gurr’s “Minorities at Risk” project, also relies on the assumption that different types of groups typically make different types of political claims, and that these differences are stable cross-nationally. Immigrants simply do not make the same types of claims as national minorities and indigenous peoples, wherever they are found around the world.13 Similarly, the various catalogues, handbooks, and manuals of “best practices” for governing diversity produced by global policy networks, written by and for policy-makers, typically operate on this group-differentiated logic. There are guides to best practices for managing immigrant integration, guides to best practices for addressing indigenous economic development, guides to best practices of bilingualism for national minorities, and so on. All of this assumes that while groups are fundamentally different in their aspirations, states are fundamentally similar, at least insofar as they are democratic states, both in the challenges they face and in the normative evaluations they should adopt in relation to minority claims. Walzer’s work stands as an important exception to this preponderance of group-differentiated approaches. Indeed, he is virtually alone in developing the state-differentiated approach. It is the type of regime, he suggests, not the type of group, that determines the relevant principles of justice to be applied to issues of diversity. Walzer’s Logic of State Differentiation This approach is found in kernel form in Walzer’s original 1983 article “States and Minorities,” which distinguishes four regimes of interethnic tolerance: empires (for example, the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires), federations (Switzerland, the former Yugoslavia), post-ethnic multination states (United States, Australia), and nation-states (France, Germany). He argues that each of these regime types has its own distinctive logic of tolerance, and concludes that these four logics “define the goals we must work for” if we are to ensure justice for minorities. In empires, minorities have a right to “bureaucratic tolerance”; in multination federations, they have a right to “genuine autonomy”; in post-ethnic multinational states, they have a right to “a balance of pluralism and individuality”; and in nation-states, they have a right to “universal citizenship.”14 On this approach, minorities are fundamentally similar—there is no need to distinguish different types of minorities within a given regime—but states are fundamentally different, defined by different logics of statehood. National minorities, immigrants, the Roma, and indigenous peoples all have the same right to “bureaucratic tolerance” within empires; they all have the same right to “a balance of pluralism and individuality” within post-ethnic multination states; and they all have the same right to “universal citizenship” within nation-states. Walzer has consistently held to this state-differentiated approach, which is elaborated most fully in On Toleration, which offers a similar (if more sophisticated) typology of regimes, each of which is seen as “defining the goals we must work for” in relation to minority rights. It should now be clear why Walzer’s approach has had trouble finding a foothold in the contemporary debate on multiculturalism. A state-differentiated but minority-undifferentiated approach simply does not connect to the governing premises of the larger academic and public debate, which treat minorities as differentiated and states as undifferentiated. I believe it is Walzer’s idiosyncratic approach to categorization—more than his controversial theory of justice-as-common-meanings—which explains his relatively marginal role in the multiculturalism debate. Of course, the two issues are not unrelated. A commitment to a Walzerian view of justice-as-shared-meanings may entail, or at least push in the direction of, a state-differentiated approach to minority rights. If we assume that there are common meanings within political communities, and that these shared meanings differ across political communities, this may incline one toward the assumption that each state is built around a shared understanding of the meaning of diversity, which it then applies to all types of ethnocultural groups, and that states can then be categorized by the differences in their shared understanding of diversity. But the connection between these two levels is, I think, more of an elective affinity than a logical entailment. One could endorse Walzer’s meta-theory without endorsing his state-differentiated approach to categorization. From the assumption that political communities have shared understandings, it does not follow that each state has just one operative principle that it applies to all types of minorities. There is nothing in the logic of justice-as-shared-meanings that requires people living in empires to apply the same principle of bureaucratic tolerance to both indigenous peoples and immigrants, or that requires citizens of federations to apply the same principle of genuine autonomy to both groups. A political community could have, as one of its shared meanings, that there are morally relevant differences between these two types of groups. (Indeed, it seems clear to me that this is one of the shared beliefs found in most Western democracies.) Put another way, Walzer’s meta-theory may provide grounds for skepticism about the possibility of uniformity in normative criteria across different political communities, but it does not yet provide grounds for disputing the assumption of deep diversity in claims-making within states, and hence for trying to articulate how group-differentiated approaches might work. Conversely, one could endorse Walzer’s state-differentiated categorization approach without endorsing his meta-theory. One might think there are objective reasons of feasibility or justice why states should avoid institutionalizing differences between types of groups, even if citizens in a particular country have a shared historical disposition to do so. Perhaps citizens have a shared understanding that immigrants have different claims from indigenous peoples, but one might think that liberal justice or international law should seek to contest this inherited understanding, and insist instead that states adopt one conception of diversity (such as bureaucratic tolerance, say, or genuine autonomy) that it then consistently applies to all minorities. States could then be categorized based on which undifferentiated principle it applies to its minorities, yielding Walzerian categorizations without Walzerian metaethics. Put another way, one can reject the assumption of intrastate deep diversity for many reasons other than Walzer’s theory of justice-as-social-meanings. Thus, it seems important to keep these two levels separate. And, as I see it, the main reason why Walzer’s work has been marginalized in the multiculturalism debates is that people reject his state-differentiated approach to categorization. Theorists and policy-makers in this field probably have a wide range of views about the extent to which justice is contextually tied to shared meanings (if they think about that question at all). But whatever their views about metaethics, they seem to converge on the assumption that addressing minority rights issues requires recognition of deep diversity within states, and hence a group-differentiated approach. I should emphasize that while Walzer’s general conceptual approach differentiates states rather than minorities, his more specific historical narratives and examples are full of insights about the differences between various types of minority groups, and about their tendency to raise different types of political claims. For example, in describing the post-ethnic model of multination states, such as the United States, he emphasizes that it could only have emerged in an “immigrant country,” where pluralism “originated in individual and familial migration,” and where “the largest part of the population was formed by the addition of individuals, one by one,” such that “nationality and ethnicity never acquired a stable territorial base.” Even where ethnic clustering developed, it “did so by individual choice, clustering for company, with no special tie to the land on which they lived.” Walzer emphasizes that where ethnic pluralism takes this immigrant form, minority groups do not “have any basis for or any reason for” claims to national self-government or secession;15 and he distinguishes this from forms of ethnic pluralism generated by conquest or dynastic alliances, such as the national minorities within the Russian empire, who were “intact and rooted communities … established on lands they had occupied for many centuries.”16 In the latter case, Walzer says, these historically rooted national minorities would have chosen self-government if they had been free to do so, and Russification was experienced as a suppression of their natural and rational desire for autonomy. In the case of immigrant groups to the United States, by contrast: Americanization was aimed at peoples far more susceptible to cultural change, for they were not only uprooted, they had uprooted themselves. Whatever the pressures that had driven them to the New World, they had chosen to come, while others like themselves, had chosen to remain. … Because of these differences, the response of the immigrants to cultural naturalization was very different from that of their counterparts in the Old World. They were in many cases acquiescent, ready to make themselves over.17 Where intact and rooted communities feel the call of national self-determination, the sort of pluralism sought by immigrant groups is “not a demand that politics follow nationality, but rather that politics be separated from nationality … it was not a demand for national liberation, but for ethnic pluralism.”18 This model of post-ethnic pluralism is, he suggests, an “ideal arrangement,” but one that is “founded” on the “distance of the people themselves from their original homeland and their ancient traditions.”19 Tensions in walzer’s account We have here a clear and compelling explanation for why uprooted immigrant groups typically and understandably generate different types of political claims from those of rooted national minorities living on their historic homeland. In such passages as the one quoted above, Walzer gives full voice to the reality of “deep diversity,” acknowledging that different types of groups typically seek to establish different modes of belonging to the larger state. Indeed, these very passages inspired my own attempt to develop a group-differentiated theory of minority rights, distinguishing the autonomy rights of homeland minorities from the accommodation rights of immigrant groups. Drawing on Walzer’s formulations, I have argued that if immigrants have no “basis” or “reason” for self-government claims, whereas rooted and intact communities do, then we should conclude that “national liberation” is a legitimate claim of national minorities (in all states), whereas “ethnic pluralism” is a legitimate claim of immigrant groups (in all states).20 Given Walzer’s own eloquent explanations of the different experiences and aspirations involved, why should not all states—at least all free and democratic states—recognize the aspirations to autonomy for their national minorities, and recognize the aspirations to ethnic pluralism for their immigrant groups? For example, why should not France be expected to adopt an American-style model of ethnic pluralism for its uprooted immigrants, and why should not the United States be expected to adopt European-style models of national liberation for its rooted minorities (such as American Indians or Puerto Ricans)? Yet Walzer himself draws different conclusions from these passages. His ultimate position, as we have seen, is that the rights of national minorities and of immigrants depend on what type of state they live in. And this state-differentiated approach in turn seems to overlap with a geographical differentiation: ethnic pluralism in New World countries, national autonomy in Old World countries. While Old World states have a duty of justice to accept the national liberation of their historic minorities, they are under no corresponding duty to accord ethnic pluralism to their immigrants, and can instead maintain a fairly thorough program of national assimilation.21 Conversely, while New World states have a duty of justice to accept the aspirations to ethnic pluralism by immigrants, they have no duty to accord national liberation to their conquered national minorities, and can instead seek to incorporate them into a model of ethnic pluralism defined by and for immigrant groups. As he explicitly states, “This is the crucial point that follows from acknowledging that there are different sorts of states: in countries like the United States, groups that originally were or incipiently are national minorities—like the Chicanos—can perhaps be dealt with as if they were immigrants.”22 I confess that I do not fully understand Walzer’s rationale for adopting this state-differentiated (and geography-differentiated) model. Perhaps Walzer felt that it was logically required by his metaethics. But if so, I think that is a mistake, for reasons mentioned earlier, and it generates deeply counterintuitive results. It is not clear to me why denying self-government to rooted communities living on their historic homelands is wrong when done in Russia but not wrong when done in North America, or why denying immigrants the freedom to express their ethnic particularity is wrong when done in North America but not wrong when done in France. It surely does not matter, morally speaking, what the longitude and latitude is. To be fair, Walzer does acknowledge that ethnic pluralism (or even national autonomy) for immigrants may be required in France if assimilation fails,23 and that autonomy for national minorities may be required in the United States if post-ethnic pluralism fails.24 But he still seems to think that France has the legitimate right to try to impose assimilationist policies on immigrants in a way that the United States must not, and that the United States has the right to try to impose an ethnic pluralist model on national minorities in a way that Russia must not. Nonimmigrant national minorities in the United States, unlike in the Old World, do not have a right to national liberation. As Walzer puts it: The question still remains whether this kind of equity, adapted to the needs of immigrant communities, can successfully be extended to the racial minorities now asserting their own group claims. Racism is the great barrier to a fully developed pluralism and as long as it exists American Indians and blacks, and perhaps Mexican Americans as well, will be tempted by (and torn between) the anti-pluralist alternatives of corporate division and state-sponsored unification. It would be presumptuous to insist that these options are foolish or unwarranted so long as opportunities for group organization and cultural expression are not equally available to all Americans.25 This passage seems to imply that if the American government extends civil rights in a nondiscriminatory way to its conquered and annexed groups, then it has no duty to respond to their aspirations to autonomy, and no duty to treat them differently from uprooted immigrant groups. I find this deeply problematic, at odds with even the most basic and widely shared sense of fairness.26 To be sure, as a result of centuries of mistreatment that has undermined their capacity for collective autonomy, members of New World national minorities today often are “torn between” ethnic pluralism and national autonomy. For some members, signing up to the ethnic pluralism model “adapted to the needs of immigrant communities” is the best they can now reasonably hope for. Therefore, I do not want to suggest that the state should impose a national autonomy model on groups that are no longer interested in, or capable of, exercising it.27 But if such groups have lost their will or capacity for autonomy, this surely is the result of historic injustice. Even if today many Chicanos are satisfied with an ethnic pluralism model, surely it was wrong to strip them of the language rights that were guaranteed to them under the treaty of 1848, which was the first step to undermining their will and capacity for national autonomy (and which was done precisely in order to undermine this will and capacity). So, too, with the dispossessions visited upon American Indians. Even if today the best option may in some circumstances be to extend immigrant post-ethnic pluralism to national minorities (although this is clearly not the case for American Indians, Québécois, or Puerto Ricans), surely we want our political theory of minority rights to recognize that the denial of national autonomy in the past was an injustice. But if so, then Walzer’s contrast between New World ethnic pluralism versus Old World national autonomy cannot stand up. What the United States (and Canada) did to its “intact and rooted” groups was as much an injustice as Russification was to Russia’s national minorities. Conversely, there undoubtedly are cases today of national minorities in Russia that no longer have the will or capacity for national autonomy, and for whom something like ethnic pluralism may be appropriate. In both the Old and New worlds, the original injustice of denying national autonomy was the same; and in both Old and New, the long-term effects of that injustice may be that some (but not all) national minorities may be content with immigrant-style ethnic pluralism. It is not clear how Walzer’s state-differentiation (or geography-differentiation) does any moral work in evaluating the justice or injustice of these historical processes. Walzer implies that the harm of coercively incorporating national minorities may have been less in the New World than in the Old World because New World colonizers (or annexers) had a “thinner” conception of national identity, and so the “cultural baggage” they imposed on incorporated groups “was always lighter.”28 But it is not clear how this fact—if it is a fact—affects the injustice of colonization, conquest, or annexation. Does the thickness or thinness of a colonizer’s national identity really affect the wrong of the involuntary incorporation of national minorities? Is there some threshold of thinness that gives hegemonic groups a license to annex, conquer, or colonize other peoples? I do not think Walzer gives us satisfactory reasons for thinking that the fair treatment of national minorities and indigenous peoples depends on the nature of the regime they inhabit. His own arguments about the identity and aspirations of “intact and rooted communities” with a “special tie to the land on which they live” provides a compelling basis for thinking that such types of groups have group-differentiated rights to a language and self-government (where they have the will and capacity to exercise them). Indeed, it seems that his main argument for not endorsing these claims is that they would violate the self-understandings of the countries involved. The United States, he says, conceives of itself as a post-ethnic pluralist state, and this self-understanding allows it to legitimately extend the immigrant model to national minorities. Conversely, the French or Germans understand themselves as nation-states built around a core ethnonational group, and this self-understanding allows them to legitimately resist forms of ethnic pluralism. This, of course, relates to Walzer’s broader metaethical approach, which ties justice to the common meanings and shared self-understandings that are said to characterize political communities, where (allegedly) “language, history, and culture come together” to “produce a collective consciousness.”29 It seems clear that Walzer wants to give states room to act upon such national self-understandings, and this may explain why he resists a group-differentiated theory of minority rights. Conclusion To fully address the question of the appropriate role of national self-understandings in moral argument would require a very different article, raising issues that are addressed in the broader literature on Walzer’s account of social criticism and interpretative ethics. Let me simply make two quick comments. First, while Western states do indeed have such nationally-specific self-understandings of pluralism, it is also part of their self-understanding that they are liberal democracies, upholding nationally anonymous values of freedom, equality, and democracy. And those values, I believe, push us in the direction of a group-differentiated theory of minority rights. This is the conclusion reached not only by various liberal theorists of minority rights but also by the international community, reflected in the proliferation of international declarations, conventions, and charters of group-differentiated minority rights, all of which affirm that such rights contribute to liberal-democratic values.30 It may be that the logic of liberal-democratic group-differentiated rights conflicts with the national narratives of particular Western states. If so, then we have a tension within the shared meanings held by citizens of these states. Citizens view themselves as members in good standing of the family of liberal democracies, upholding nationally anonymous values of freedom and equality, and these push in the direction of a liberal-democratic group-differentiated multiculturalism. Yet they also view themselves as bearers of nationally specific “stories of peoplehood” that push against these forms of multiculturalism.31 A focus on the importance of shared meanings does not resolve this issue, since both the nationally anonymous liberal values and the distinctive national narratives are central to the shared meanings and self-understandings of the society. I see no grounds, even within Walzer’s own metaethics, for saying that the latter should trump the former. Second, even if we set aside nationally anonymous liberal values and focus instead just on the historic national narratives, we need to question Walzer’s assumption that these narratives rest upon a singular and undifferentiated approach to diversity. For example, it is not true that the United States has historically applied the same principle of post-ethnic pluralism to immigrants, Puerto Ricans, and American Indians, or that multination federations, such as Switzerland and Canada, apply the same principle of autonomy to immigrants as to their historic minorities. It may well be true that Americans often downplay or ignore these differences when they imagine their country, particularly in highly ritualized or rhetorical contexts. But in practice, when confronted with the real world challenges of deep diversity, the United States—like every other Western democracy—recognizes the need to distinguish different types of minorities. Thus, the image of being a “post-ethnic” state is just that—a collective imaginary or myth—and not at all the operative principle that guides legislators and court cases. In his general account of “spheres of justice,” Walzer emphasizes that we identify shared meanings of justice in part by looking at actual practices of how goods are distributed in order to identify the normative logic that is embedded in these practices. If we apply this method to the field of ethnic diversity, it becomes clear that in the United States, as elsewhere, the operative normative logic is group-differentiated. Yet Walzer ignores or sets aside these group-differentiated practices, and does not attempt to understand their underlying normative logic. Instead, he appeals to a highly ritualized and rhetorical collective imaginary as the basis for his shared meanings. Here again, I see no grounds, even within Walzer’s own metaethics, for privileging ritualized collective imaginaries over operative practices as the basis for identifying shared meanings. In short, even if we start from national self-understandings—and I agree with Walzer that in many argumentative contexts we have no other possible starting point—I believe there are factors that lead us in a group-differentiated direction. These national self-understandings may contain a ritualized self-image that obscures group differences, but they also contain (1) a commitment to nationally anonymous liberal-democratic norms of justice that underpin claims to group-differentiated rights; and (2) well-established and historically rooted norms and practices of group-differentiated rights. Whether we ascend to the abstract levels of ideal theories of justice or descend to a contextual study of each country’s traditions, in either case we quickly uncover reasons for shifting from a state-differentiated to a group-differentiated approach.32 Notes 1 This is just a small subset of the relevant declarations, conventions, and charters. For a more comprehensive description, see Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 2 Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); Jeff Spinner-Halev, The Boundaries of Citizenship: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the Liberal State (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); Joseph Carens, Culture, Citizenship and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice as Evenhandedness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Anne Phillips, The Politics of Presence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For a useful collection that surveys the field, see Anthony Laden and David Owen, eds., Multiculturalism and Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 3 Jacob Levy, “Michael Walzer on Political, Moral, and Cultural Pluralism,” in Yitzhak Benbaji and Naomi Sussmann, eds., Reading Walzer: Sovereignty, Culture, and Justice (London: Routledge, forthcoming). 4 Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 28. 5 Levy, “Michael Walzer on Political, Moral, and Cultural Pluralism.” My own version of this criticism of Walzer is elaborated in Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), ch. 11. 6 For versions of this sort of typology, see Spinner-Halev, Boundaries of Citizenship; Carens, Culture, Citizenship and Community; Jacob Levy, The Multiculturalism of Fear (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, Citizenship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 7 Charles Taylor, “Shared and Divergent Values,” in Ronald L. Watts and Douglas M. Brown, eds., Options for a New Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 53–76. 8 I take the phrase “nationally anonymous” liberal values from Christian Joppke, “The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and Policy,”British Journal of Sociology 55, no. 2 (2004), pp. 237–57. 9 More accurately, it treats Western liberal democracies as an undifferentiated category, on the assumption that they are all constitutionally committed to nationally anonymous principles of freedom, equality, and democracy. This raises an interesting question about whether or how one can extend theories of minority rights to nonliberal or nondemocratic states. I return to this below. 10 For versions of this critique, see James Johnson, “Why Respect Culture?”American Journal of Political Science 44, no. 3 (2000), pp. 405–18; and Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). 11 For a detailed discussion of the “targeted” nature of European minority rights norms, see Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys. 12 See, e.g., Jane K. Cowan, Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, and Richard A. Wilson, eds., Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and the voluminous debate around essentialist assumptions in the international legal discourse of indigeneity (e.g., Adam Kuper, “The Return of the Native,”Current Anthropology 44, no. 3 [2003], pp. 389–402). 13 Ted Robert Gurr, Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflict (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Peace Press, 1993); and Ted Robert Gurr, Peoples versus States: Minorities at Risk in the New Century (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Peace Press, 2000). 14 Michael Walzer, “States and Minorities,” in Charles Fried, ed., Minorities: Community and Identity (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1983), p. 227. 15 Michael Walzer, “Pluralism in Political Perspective,” in Michael Walzer, Edward T, Kantowicz, John Higham, and Mona Harrington, The Politics of Ethnicity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 6–7. 16 Ibid., p. 9. 17 Ibid., pp. 9–10. 18 Ibid., pp. 10–11. 19 Walzer, “States and Minorities,” p. 224. 20 See, e.g., Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 20–21. 21 Actually, Walzer’s views on the appropriate norms for the treatment of immigrants in Old World nation-states like France have evolved over time—compare Walzer, “Pluralism in Political Perspective,” to Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), to Michael Walzer, “Nation States and Immigrant Societies,” in Will Kymlicka and Magda Opalski, eds., Can Liberal Pluralism Be Exported? Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 150–53. It would take me too far afield to track these changes, which I do not think affect the more basic issue of the choice between state-differentiated and group-differentiated approaches. 22 Walzer, “Nation-States and Immigrant Societies,” p. 153. For other statements of this commitment to a post-ethnic pluralism in the United States, see Michael Walzer, What It Means to Be an American: Essays on the American Experience (New York: Marsilio, 1992); Michael Walzer, “The New Tribalism,”Dissent (Spring 1992), pp. 164–71; and Michael Walzer, “Multiculturalism and Individualism,”Dissent (Spring 1994), pp. 185–91. 23 Walzer, “Nation-States and Immigrant Societies.” 24 Walzer, “Pluralism in Political Perspective,” pp. 27–28. 25 Ibid., p. 27, my emphasis. 26 For a similar critique, see Bonnie Honig, “Democracy and Foreignness: Democratic Cosmopolitanism and the Myth of an Immigrant America,” in Laden and Owen, eds., Multiculturalism and Political Theory, pp. 373–407. Honig argues that Walzer’s approach to minority rights “normatively privileges one particular trajectory to citizenship: from immigrant to citizen. [This] account captures something about American democracy, while also missing a great deal. American democracy is founded not only on immigration, but also on conquest (Native Americans) and slavery (the forced importation of African slave labor), and, in the post-founding era, on expansion (Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, etc.), annexation (French settlements in Illinois, St. Louis, and New Orleans as well as a significant Spanish-speaking population in the southwest as a result of the war with Mexico)” (p. 375). As she notes, while “Walzer does invite these other groups to become part of his immigrant America,” he “never asks whether his normative privileging of the immigrant-ethnic-citizen trajectory to membership, and the invitation to adapt to it, may itself obscure particular claims, injustices, and bases of organization for specific groups” (p. 386, n. 33). 27 This is an important point in relation to the “essentialism” critique mentioned earlier. Both within normative theories of liberal multiculturalism and within contemporary international law, minority rights are understood precisely as rights, not duties. Indigenous peoples have a right to seek land claims or self-government rights, but they are under no duty to do so if they would prefer instead to participate through an ethnic pluralism model. Similarly, national minorities have a right to claim official language status and regional autonomy if they so choose, but are under no duty to make these claims if these aspirations are not present in the group. Neither liberal theory nor international law is compatible with assigning duties of cultural preservation on people who no longer wish to preserve their language or cultural practices. A theory of minority rights, however, ensures that this is indeed their own choice, to be resolved by democratic debate and decision-making within the group, and not something decided for them by the state. 28 Walzer, “Nation-States and Immigrant Societies,” p. 153. 29 Walzer, Spheres of Justice, p. 28. 30 For a more detailed exposition of how international organizations link group-differentiated minority rights to core liberal-democratic values, see Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys. 31 For an interesting discussion of the “stories of peoplehood” that countries tell themselves, see Rogers Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 32 What about countries that do not view themselves as members of the family of liberal democracies? In these contexts, both liberal theories of multiculturalism and international legal norms of minority rights may well be perceived as an external imposition at odds with local self-understandings. Indeed, I am not optimistic about the prospects for an international consensus on these issues, in part for this reason. However, even here I think we should be cautious about jumping too quickly to the assumption that the problem lies at the level of different shared meanings of justice. In reality, most minority rights claims can be understood by appeal to very elementary and widely accepted norms of fairness and reciprocity—majorities around the world are doing things to minorities that they would never want done to themselves. One need not be a liberal to see the injustice in that. So the opposition to international norms of minority rights is not so much the inability to find a widely accepted idea of justice to underpin these claims, but rather the fact that these claims objectively pose a much greater threat to individual well-being and collective security in some countries than in others. Within the consolidated liberal democracies, the risks of adopting minority rights are relatively small; in much of the rest of the world, the risks of violence or instability are much higher. This provides ample grounds for being cautious about exporting Western models of multiculturalism, but we misidentify the problem if we assume that it is only or primarily a matter of different cultural values or different understandings of justice. See Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys, chs. 6 and 7.

___2000. Le droit des minorités et le multiculturalisme: l’évolution du débat anglo-américain. Comprendre, Revue de philosophie et de sciences sociales (1):141-172.

145: Des sondages d’opinion montrent que, bien loin de s’opposer aux principes libéraux, les minorités ne se distinguent pas des majorités d’un point  de vue statistique dans leur attachement à ces principes. Cela est certainement vrai s’agissant des minorités nationales: les valeurs poliques des minorités catalane, écossaise ou québécoise sont qualisment identiques à celles des majorités espagnole, anglaise ou canadienne. De même les pupulations noire et blanche aux Etats-Unis partagent les mêmes principes politiques et manifestent le même engagement à l’égard de la Constitution et du Bill of Rights.

___(2009), ‘Categorizing Groups, Categorizing States: Theorizing Minority Rights in a World of Deep Diversity’, Ethics & International Affairs, 23 (4), 371-88.

This article will also be published in Yitzhak Benbaji and Naomi Sussmann, eds., Reading Walzer: Sovereignty, Culture, and Justice (London: Routledge, forthcoming). Thanks to Yitzhak and Naomi, and to the editors and reviewers of Ethics & International Affairs, for their helpful suggestions.

ABSTRACT

Since 1989 we have witnessed a proliferation of efforts to develop international norms of the rights of ethnocultural minorities, such as the UN’s 1992 Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, the Council of Europe’s 1995 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, and the Organization of American States’ 1997 draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This activity at the level of international law is reflected in a comparable explosion of interest in minority rights among normative political theorists.

In this context, Michael Walzer’s work occupies an important but somewhat anomalous role. On the one hand, he was arguably the first political theorist, at least in the postwar era, to take seriously the issue of minority rights. Nonetheless, Walzer’s work has had surprisingly little enduring impact on multiculturalism debates in either academic political theory or international law.

One explanation for this puzzle is that Walzer’s substantive discussion of minority rights seems to sit uneasily with his more foundational theory of justice, laid out in Spheres of Justice. I want to suggest a distinct (but complementary) explanation for why Walzer’s work has not permeated the debate, focusing less on metaethical worries about his account of common meanings, and more on the practicalities of how he categorizes ethnic diversity. Walzer’s state-differentiated but minority-undifferentiated approach simply does not connect to the governing premises of the larger academic and public debate, which treat minorities as differentiated and states as undifferentiated. I believe it is Walzer’s idiosyncratic approach to categorization—more than his controversial theory of justice-as-common-meanings—which explains his relatively marginal role in the multiculturalism debate.

DIGITAL OBJECT IDENTIFIER (DOI)
10.1111/j.1747-7093.2009.00229.x About DOI
ARTICLE TEXT
Since 1989 we have witnessed a proliferation of efforts to develop international norms of the rights of ethnocultural minorities, such as the UN’s 1992 Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, the Council of Europe’s 1995 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, and the Organization of American States’ 1997 draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.1 This activity at the level of international law is reflected in a comparable explosion of interest in minority rights among normative political theorists. In the same twenty-year period we have seen a proliferation of attempts at formulating a normative theory of minority rights and examining how minority rights relate to broader political values (such as freedom, equality, democracy, and citizenship) and broader normative frameworks (such as liberalism, communitarianism, and republicanism). Key works here include those by Charles Taylor, Jim Tully, Iris Young, Jeff Spinner-Halev, Bhikhu Parekh, Yael Tamir, Joseph Carens, Susan Okin, and Anne Phillips—a rich literature that has informed and inspired my own work in the field.2

In this context, Michael Walzer’s work occupies an important but somewhat anomalous role. On the one hand, he was arguably the first political theorist, at least in the postwar era, to take seriously the issue of minority rights. He wrote two groundbreaking articles in 1982 and 1983—”Pluralism in Political Perspective” and “States and Minorities”—which are remarkable for their prescience. They lay out virtually all of the relevant normative and theoretical issues in a clear and concise way, several years before minority rights became a hot topic in academia or, indeed, in policy circles. And he has continued to develop these ideas over time, including in his important 1997 book, On Toleration, which refines and deepens his account of the basic framework within which to theorize state-minority relations—a framework initially developed in his 1983 article. The resulting corpus of work is among the most intellectually sophisticated available, combining (as does all his work) profound moral reflections with an impressive historical and geographical reach.

Nonetheless, Walzer’s work has had surprisingly little enduring impact on multiculturalism debates in either academic political theory or international law. Whereas his work on just and unjust wars dominates the field, his work on minority rights has “more or less disappeared from view.”3

Two forms of differentiation

One explanation for this puzzle is that Walzer’s substantive discussion of minority rights seems to sit uneasily with his more foundational theory of justice, laid out in Spheres of Justice. In the latter, Walzer seems to presuppose a high degree of cultural homogeneity within states. His theory of justice requires that social goods be distributed according to their “common meanings” within a society, and this in turn seems to require a fairly thick shared culture among citizens. In a much-cited (and much-criticized) passage, Walzer writes that: “The political community is probably the closest we can come to a world of common meanings. Language, history, and culture come together (come more closely together than anywhere else) to produce a collective consciousness.”4 Passages such as this one seem to render the phenomenon of ethnically divided societies invisible. If one of the core presuppositions of a theory of justice is that citizens share a “language, history, and culture,” then the question of how to justly treat those with a different language, history, and culture cannot arise, except as an afterthought or anomaly. Since most theorists (and policy-makers) working on minority rights start from the opposite premise—namely, that language, history, and culture do not come together in a political community—they have looked elsewhere for their theoretical tools.

I will not rehearse that familiar critique here, in part because it is covered in a recent paper by Jacob Levy.5 Instead, I want to suggest a distinct (but complementary) explanation for why Walzer’s work has not permeated the debate, focusing less on metaethical worries about his account of common meanings, and more on the practicalities of how he categorizes ethnic diversity. One of the crucial tasks of any theory of minority rights is to bring some conceptual order to the dizzying array of state-minority relations around the world. There is enormous variation between states as to how they treat their minorities; and indeed enormous variation within states, as different types of minorities are accorded different kinds of rights, powers, or accommodations from the state. Given this complexity, it seems unlikely that any single formula or model will apply to all minorities at all times. Yet if we are to make progress, theoretically or practically, we need to be able to make some types of generalizations, identifying at least certain common patterns or dynamics of state-minority relations, and trying to make sense of their underlying normative logic.

All of us who work in this field struggle with this issue of generalization and categorization. To oversimplify, we can distinguish two broad ways of theorizing minority rights. One option (the one I have pursued) is to develop a typology of different types of ethnocultural groups, and to formulate the rights appropriate to each type of group—for example, one set of norms for indigenous peoples, such as the Maori or American Indians (including rights to self-government, customary law, and land claims); one set of norms for regionally concentrated national minorities, such as the Catalans or Québécois (including rights to territorial autonomy and official language status); one set of norms for immigrants and refugees (including rights to naturalization and reasonable accommodations); and so on. On this view, groups legitimately vary in their minority rights—for example, national minorities and indigenous peoples might have language rights that immigrant groups do not have—but wherever each of these types of minorities exists, the state has a duty to accord them their distinctive rights.

Another option (the one pursued by Walzer) is to develop a typology of different types of states, and to formulate the norms that each type of state should respect—for example, a traditional nation-state, such as France, can adopt one set of laws or policies toward cultural diversity, which would legitimately differ from those that are appropriate for a post-ethnic multination state, a federation, a consociational state, or an empire. On this second view, whether an ethnocultural group has a right to official language status would depend not on the type of group it is (for example, national minority versus immigrant group), but on the type of state it finds itself in. A traditional nation-state built around a core ethnonational group might have different duties in relation to minority languages, both for its immigrants and national minorities, than a post-ethnic state that defines itself in nonethnic terms.

In short, we can either have a group-differentiated theory of minority rights or a state-differentiated theory of minority rights. The former focuses on categorizing the different types of groups, each of which is seen as having a distinctive logic of legitimate claims-making, while ignoring or downplaying the relevance of differences between types of states. No matter what type of state they find themselves in, specific types of minorities are seen as having an intrinsic tendency, and legitimate right, to make certain types of claims, and all states are seen as having the same obligations toward the relevant categories of minorities.

The state-differentiated approach, by contrast, focuses on categorizing different types of states, each of which is seen as having distinctive legitimate approaches to its internal diversity, while downplaying the relevance of group differences within each state. Each type of state is seen as having a distinctive but coherent logic toward diversity, which it appropriately applies to all its substate groups, whether immigrant, regional national minority, or indigenous people.

The Logic of Group Differentiation
These are obviously ideal types. In reality, most theorists and practitioners invariably end up deploying some combination of the group-differentiated and the state-differentiated approaches. There are just too many differences both among minorities and among states to rely exclusively on one approach alone. However, most people do fall clearly on one side of this fault line, with the vast majority of both academic theorists and practitioners endorsing the group-differentiated approach. If one picks up any of the major texts on theories of multiculturalism and minority rights, one is likely to find that the discussion is organized around a typology of groups. The precise typology differs from author to author, depending on their particular interests or geographical focus, but one typically finds a chapter on immigrants, a chapter on indigenous peoples, a chapter on regional national(ist) groups, a chapter on isolationalist ethnoreligious groups (such as the Amish), a chapter on African Americans as a historically enslaved group, and so on.6 The goal in each case is to articulate the normative basis of each group’s claims against the state, where the state is understood in generic terms as a “Western liberal democracy,” with the assumption that all Western states—indeed all states that think of themselves as members in good standing of the family of democracies—should operate with similar criteria and principles in evaluating these claims.

This predilection for group-based typologies rests on a number of assumptions that are not always made explicit. I would highlight three such assumptions. First, it assumes what Charles Taylor calls “deep diversity”—namely, the assumption that different types of groups within each state (legitimately) stand in different relations to the larger state. Different types of groups want to belong to the state in different ways, and to exercise different forms of citizenship. In the Canadian case, writes Taylor:

To build a country for everyone, Canada would have to allow for second-level or “deep” diversity, in which a plurality of ways of belonging would be acknowledged or accepted. Someone of, say, Italian extraction in Toronto or Ukrainian extraction in Edmonton might indeed feel Canadian as a bearer of individual rights in a multicultural mosaic. His or her belonging would not “pass through” some other community, although the ethnic identity might be important to him or her in various ways. But this person might nevertheless accept that a Quebecois or a Cree or a Dene might belong in a very different way, that these persons were Canadian through being members of their national communities. Reciprocally, the Quebecois, Cree or Dene would accept the perfect legitimacy of the “mosaic” identity.7

Let us call this the assumption of intrastate deep diversity in claims-making. While this passage is framed in reference to Canada, defenders of the group-differentiated approach typically assume—and this is the second key assumption—that this sort of deep diversity arises from, and reflects, the enduring nature of particular types of ethnocultural groups, and hence emerges wherever group members are free to express their identities and aspirations. Given this assumption, any society that allows for the free expression and mobilization of ethnocultural identities—that is to say, any liberal democracy—is likely to witness similar patterns of deep diversity. In any free and democratic society, we should expect to find that indigenous peoples and national minorities seek to belong to the state in a different way from immigrant and refugee groups, with the former seeking forms of territorial autonomy, language rights, and institutional completeness not sought by immigrant groups. Let us call this the assumption of cross-national consistency in claims-making.

Finally, it is assumed that any liberal-democratic state should use similar criteria in evaluating these claims, such as principles of individual freedom, social justice (both distributive justice and rectificatory justice), and effective democratic participation. It is these “nationally anonymous” liberal-democratic criteria, rather than nationally-specific narratives or self-understandings, that should determine the normative evaluation of minority claims.8 It may well be that some of these group-differentiated claims pose a significant challenge to the self-understandings of particular Western states. Such countries as Germany that have conceived of themselves as ethnic nations may have trouble accepting the naturalization and accommodation of certain immigrant groups, such as the Turks. Such countries as the United States that have conceived of themselves as voluntary associations of freely consenting individuals may have trouble accepting claims to self-government by historically incorporated national groups, such as American Indians or Puerto Ricans. But national self-understandings are not self-justifying: to reject minority claims that comply with the requirements of core liberal-democratic values simply because they conflict with national mythologies or narratives would be fundamentally illiberal and undemocratic. Let us call this the assumption of uniformity in normative criteria.

If we start from these three assumptions, then something like the group-differentiated approach more or less follows naturally. If we assume that different types of groups typically seek different types of rights (whenever they are free to do so), and that these typological differences are stable across (democratic) countries, and that all (democratic) countries should apply the same “nationally anonymous” criteria in evaluating these claims, then a political theory of minority rights is virtually destined to take the form of group-differentiated rights that are applicable to all (democratic) states. In short, minorities are differentiated, states are undifferentiated.9

Of course, all three of these assumptions can be questioned. Indeed, some critics have argued that the tendency of political theorists to develop such group-differentiated theories of minority rights depends on “essentialist” and “reified” understandings of ethnocultural groups. Indigenous groups, for example, do not have an inherent “telos” that means they are somehow naturally or inevitably destined to claim land rights and self-government rights. Similarly, there is no “essence” to national minorities that predestines them to demand regional autonomy and official language status, and no essence to immigrant groups that predestines them to demand naturalization and ethnocultural accommodation. The tendency of political theorists to rely on such essentialist assumptions about typological differences is often said to reflect their ignorance of the findings of sociology and anthropology, which reveal the contingent, contested, and strategic nature of these political claims.10

And yet this predilection for a group-differentiated approach is not just found among academic political theorists. On the contrary, it seems to be the preferred approach among international lawyers as well. As noted earlier, we have witnessed a veritable explosion of new international conventions and declarations on minority rights that also rely on a group-differentiated approach. For example, within the European context (where international minority rights norms are most developed), there are separate international legal instruments or policy directives targeted at (a) indigenous peoples, (b) national minorities, (c) migrant workers, and (d) the Roma.11 In each case, we see the same threefold set of assumptions that underpin recent political theories of minority rights: namely, (1) that these types of groups typically each raise different sorts of claims, and so should be dealt with separately (intrastate deep diversity in claims-making); (2) that these typological differences are stable across the Western democracies (cross-national consistency in claims-making); and (3) that liberal democracies can and should apply common standards in evaluating these claims (uniformity in normative criteria).

Of course, it is possible that international lawyers are also in the thrall of essentialist assumptions about ethnocultural groups, and that critique too has been made.12 But we can also find a similar reliance on group-differentiated typologies among the most sophisticated empirical investigators of state-minority relations. For example, the most systematic cross-national study of state-minority relations, Ted Gurr’s “Minorities at Risk” project, also relies on the assumption that different types of groups typically make different types of political claims, and that these differences are stable cross-nationally. Immigrants simply do not make the same types of claims as national minorities and indigenous peoples, wherever they are found around the world.13 Similarly, the various catalogues, handbooks, and manuals of “best practices” for governing diversity produced by global policy networks, written by and for policy-makers, typically operate on this group-differentiated logic. There are guides to best practices for managing immigrant integration, guides to best practices for addressing indigenous economic development, guides to best practices of bilingualism for national minorities, and so on. All of this assumes that while groups are fundamentally different in their aspirations, states are fundamentally similar, at least insofar as they are democratic states, both in the challenges they face and in the normative evaluations they should adopt in relation to minority claims.

Walzer’s work stands as an important exception to this preponderance of group-differentiated approaches. Indeed, he is virtually alone in developing the state-differentiated approach. It is the type of regime, he suggests, not the type of group, that determines the relevant principles of justice to be applied to issues of diversity.

Walzer’s Logic of State Differentiation
This approach is found in kernel form in Walzer’s original 1983 article “States and Minorities,” which distinguishes four regimes of interethnic tolerance: empires (for example, the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires), federations (Switzerland, the former Yugoslavia), post-ethnic multination states (United States, Australia), and nation-states (France, Germany). He argues that each of these regime types has its own distinctive logic of tolerance, and concludes that these four logics “define the goals we must work for” if we are to ensure justice for minorities. In empires, minorities have a right to “bureaucratic tolerance”; in multination federations, they have a right to “genuine autonomy”; in post-ethnic multinational states, they have a right to “a balance of pluralism and individuality”; and in nation-states, they have a right to “universal citizenship.”14 On this approach, minorities are fundamentally similar—there is no need to distinguish different types of minorities within a given regime—but states are fundamentally different, defined by different logics of statehood. National minorities, immigrants, the Roma, and indigenous peoples all have the same right to “bureaucratic tolerance” within empires; they all have the same right to “a balance of pluralism and individuality” within post-ethnic multination states; and they all have the same right to “universal citizenship” within nation-states. Walzer has consistently held to this state-differentiated approach, which is elaborated most fully in On Toleration, which offers a similar (if more sophisticated) typology of regimes, each of which is seen as “defining the goals we must work for” in relation to minority rights.

It should now be clear why Walzer’s approach has had trouble finding a foothold in the contemporary debate on multiculturalism. A state-differentiated but minority-undifferentiated approach simply does not connect to the governing premises of the larger academic and public debate, which treat minorities as differentiated and states as undifferentiated. I believe it is Walzer’s idiosyncratic approach to categorization—more than his controversial theory of justice-as-common-meanings—which explains his relatively marginal role in the multiculturalism debate.

Of course, the two issues are not unrelated. A commitment to a Walzerian view of justice-as-shared-meanings may entail, or at least push in the direction of, a state-differentiated approach to minority rights. If we assume that there are common meanings within political communities, and that these shared meanings differ across political communities, this may incline one toward the assumption that each state is built around a shared understanding of the meaning of diversity, which it then applies to all types of ethnocultural groups, and that states can then be categorized by the differences in their shared understanding of diversity.

But the connection between these two levels is, I think, more of an elective affinity than a logical entailment. One could endorse Walzer’s meta-theory without endorsing his state-differentiated approach to categorization. From the assumption that political communities have shared understandings, it does not follow that each state has just one operative principle that it applies to all types of minorities. There is nothing in the logic of justice-as-shared-meanings that requires people living in empires to apply the same principle of bureaucratic tolerance to both indigenous peoples and immigrants, or that requires citizens of federations to apply the same principle of genuine autonomy to both groups. A political community could have, as one of its shared meanings, that there are morally relevant differences between these two types of groups. (Indeed, it seems clear to me that this is one of the shared beliefs found in most Western democracies.) Put another way, Walzer’s meta-theory may provide grounds for skepticism about the possibility of uniformity in normative criteria across different political communities, but it does not yet provide grounds for disputing the assumption of deep diversity in claims-making within states, and hence for trying to articulate how group-differentiated approaches might work.

Conversely, one could endorse Walzer’s state-differentiated categorization approach without endorsing his meta-theory. One might think there are objective reasons of feasibility or justice why states should avoid institutionalizing differences between types of groups, even if citizens in a particular country have a shared historical disposition to do so. Perhaps citizens have a shared understanding that immigrants have different claims from indigenous peoples, but one might think that liberal justice or international law should seek to contest this inherited understanding, and insist instead that states adopt one conception of diversity (such as bureaucratic tolerance, say, or genuine autonomy) that it then consistently applies to all minorities. States could then be categorized based on which undifferentiated principle it applies to its minorities, yielding Walzerian categorizations without Walzerian metaethics. Put another way, one can reject the assumption of intrastate deep diversity for many reasons other than Walzer’s theory of justice-as-social-meanings.

Thus, it seems important to keep these two levels separate. And, as I see it, the main reason why Walzer’s work has been marginalized in the multiculturalism debates is that people reject his state-differentiated approach to categorization. Theorists and policy-makers in this field probably have a wide range of views about the extent to which justice is contextually tied to shared meanings (if they think about that question at all). But whatever their views about metaethics, they seem to converge on the assumption that addressing minority rights issues requires recognition of deep diversity within states, and hence a group-differentiated approach.

I should emphasize that while Walzer’s general conceptual approach differentiates states rather than minorities, his more specific historical narratives and examples are full of insights about the differences between various types of minority groups, and about their tendency to raise different types of political claims. For example, in describing the post-ethnic model of multination states, such as the United States, he emphasizes that it could only have emerged in an “immigrant country,” where pluralism “originated in individual and familial migration,” and where “the largest part of the population was formed by the addition of individuals, one by one,” such that “nationality and ethnicity never acquired a stable territorial base.” Even where ethnic clustering developed, it “did so by individual choice, clustering for company, with no special tie to the land on which they lived.” Walzer emphasizes that where ethnic pluralism takes this immigrant form, minority groups do not “have any basis for or any reason for” claims to national self-government or secession;15 and he distinguishes this from forms of ethnic pluralism generated by conquest or dynastic alliances, such as the national minorities within the Russian empire, who were “intact and rooted communities … established on lands they had occupied for many centuries.”16 In the latter case, Walzer says, these historically rooted national minorities would have chosen self-government if they had been free to do so, and Russification was experienced as a suppression of their natural and rational desire for autonomy. In the case of immigrant groups to the United States, by contrast:

Americanization was aimed at peoples far more susceptible to cultural change, for they were not only uprooted, they had uprooted themselves. Whatever the pressures that had driven them to the New World, they had chosen to come, while others like themselves, had chosen to remain. … Because of these differences, the response of the immigrants to cultural naturalization was very different from that of their counterparts in the Old World. They were in many cases acquiescent, ready to make themselves over.17

Where intact and rooted communities feel the call of national self-determination, the sort of pluralism sought by immigrant groups is “not a demand that politics follow nationality, but rather that politics be separated from nationality … it was not a demand for national liberation, but for ethnic pluralism.”18 This model of post-ethnic pluralism is, he suggests, an “ideal arrangement,” but one that is “founded” on the “distance of the people themselves from their original homeland and their ancient traditions.”19

Tensions in walzer’s account

We have here a clear and compelling explanation for why uprooted immigrant groups typically and understandably generate different types of political claims from those of rooted national minorities living on their historic homeland. In such passages as the one quoted above, Walzer gives full voice to the reality of “deep diversity,” acknowledging that different types of groups typically seek to establish different modes of belonging to the larger state. Indeed, these very passages inspired my own attempt to develop a group-differentiated theory of minority rights, distinguishing the autonomy rights of homeland minorities from the accommodation rights of immigrant groups. Drawing on Walzer’s formulations, I have argued that if immigrants have no “basis” or “reason” for self-government claims, whereas rooted and intact communities do, then we should conclude that “national liberation” is a legitimate claim of national minorities (in all states), whereas “ethnic pluralism” is a legitimate claim of immigrant groups (in all states).20 Given Walzer’s own eloquent explanations of the different experiences and aspirations involved, why should not all states—at least all free and democratic states—recognize the aspirations to autonomy for their national minorities, and recognize the aspirations to ethnic pluralism for their immigrant groups? For example, why should not France be expected to adopt an American-style model of ethnic pluralism for its uprooted immigrants, and why should not the United States be expected to adopt European-style models of national liberation for its rooted minorities (such as American Indians or Puerto Ricans)?

Yet Walzer himself draws different conclusions from these passages. His ultimate position, as we have seen, is that the rights of national minorities and of immigrants depend on what type of state they live in. And this state-differentiated approach in turn seems to overlap with a geographical differentiation: ethnic pluralism in New World countries, national autonomy in Old World countries. While Old World states have a duty of justice to accept the national liberation of their historic minorities, they are under no corresponding duty to accord ethnic pluralism to their immigrants, and can instead maintain a fairly thorough program of national assimilation.21 Conversely, while New World states have a duty of justice to accept the aspirations to ethnic pluralism by immigrants, they have no duty to accord national liberation to their conquered national minorities, and can instead seek to incorporate them into a model of ethnic pluralism defined by and for immigrant groups. As he explicitly states, “This is the crucial point that follows from acknowledging that there are different sorts of states: in countries like the United States, groups that originally were or incipiently are national minorities—like the Chicanos—can perhaps be dealt with as if they were immigrants.”22

I confess that I do not fully understand Walzer’s rationale for adopting this state-differentiated (and geography-differentiated) model. Perhaps Walzer felt that it was logically required by his metaethics. But if so, I think that is a mistake, for reasons mentioned earlier, and it generates deeply counterintuitive results. It is not clear to me why denying self-government to rooted communities living on their historic homelands is wrong when done in Russia but not wrong when done in North America, or why denying immigrants the freedom to express their ethnic particularity is wrong when done in North America but not wrong when done in France. It surely does not matter, morally speaking, what the longitude and latitude is.

To be fair, Walzer does acknowledge that ethnic pluralism (or even national autonomy) for immigrants may be required in France if assimilation fails,23 and that autonomy for national minorities may be required in the United States if post-ethnic pluralism fails.24 But he still seems to think that France has the legitimate right to try to impose assimilationist policies on immigrants in a way that the United States must not, and that the United States has the right to try to impose an ethnic pluralist model on national minorities in a way that Russia must not. Nonimmigrant national minorities in the United States, unlike in the Old World, do not have a right to national liberation. As Walzer puts it:

The question still remains whether this kind of equity, adapted to the needs of immigrant communities, can successfully be extended to the racial minorities now asserting their own group claims. Racism is the great barrier to a fully developed pluralism and as long as it exists American Indians and blacks, and perhaps Mexican Americans as well, will be tempted by (and torn between) the anti-pluralist alternatives of corporate division and state-sponsored unification. It would be presumptuous to insist that these options are foolish or unwarranted so long as opportunities for group organization and cultural expression are not equally available to all Americans.25

This passage seems to imply that if the American government extends civil rights in a nondiscriminatory way to its conquered and annexed groups, then it has no duty to respond to their aspirations to autonomy, and no duty to treat them differently from uprooted immigrant groups.

I find this deeply problematic, at odds with even the most basic and widely shared sense of fairness.26 To be sure, as a result of centuries of mistreatment that has undermined their capacity for collective autonomy, members of New World national minorities today often are “torn between” ethnic pluralism and national autonomy. For some members, signing up to the ethnic pluralism model “adapted to the needs of immigrant communities” is the best they can now reasonably hope for. Therefore, I do not want to suggest that the state should impose a national autonomy model on groups that are no longer interested in, or capable of, exercising it.27

But if such groups have lost their will or capacity for autonomy, this surely is the result of historic injustice. Even if today many Chicanos are satisfied with an ethnic pluralism model, surely it was wrong to strip them of the language rights that were guaranteed to them under the treaty of 1848, which was the first step to undermining their will and capacity for national autonomy (and which was done precisely in order to undermine this will and capacity). So, too, with the dispossessions visited upon American Indians. Even if today the best option may in some circumstances be to extend immigrant post-ethnic pluralism to national minorities (although this is clearly not the case for American Indians, Québécois, or Puerto Ricans), surely we want our political theory of minority rights to recognize that the denial of national autonomy in the past was an injustice. But if so, then Walzer’s contrast between New World ethnic pluralism versus Old World national autonomy cannot stand up. What the United States (and Canada) did to its “intact and rooted” groups was as much an injustice as Russification was to Russia’s national minorities. Conversely, there undoubtedly are cases today of national minorities in Russia that no longer have the will or capacity for national autonomy, and for whom something like ethnic pluralism may be appropriate. In both the Old and New worlds, the original injustice of denying national autonomy was the same; and in both Old and New, the long-term effects of that injustice may be that some (but not all) national minorities may be content with immigrant-style ethnic pluralism. It is not clear how Walzer’s state-differentiation (or geography-differentiation) does any moral work in evaluating the justice or injustice of these historical processes.

Walzer implies that the harm of coercively incorporating national minorities may have been less in the New World than in the Old World because New World colonizers (or annexers) had a “thinner” conception of national identity, and so the “cultural baggage” they imposed on incorporated groups “was always lighter.”28 But it is not clear how this fact—if it is a fact—affects the injustice of colonization, conquest, or annexation. Does the thickness or thinness of a colonizer’s national identity really affect the wrong of the involuntary incorporation of national minorities? Is there some threshold of thinness that gives hegemonic groups a license to annex, conquer, or colonize other peoples?

I do not think Walzer gives us satisfactory reasons for thinking that the fair treatment of national minorities and indigenous peoples depends on the nature of the regime they inhabit. His own arguments about the identity and aspirations of “intact and rooted communities” with a “special tie to the land on which they live” provides a compelling basis for thinking that such types of groups have group-differentiated rights to a language and self-government (where they have the will and capacity to exercise them). Indeed, it seems that his main argument for not endorsing these claims is that they would violate the self-understandings of the countries involved. The United States, he says, conceives of itself as a post-ethnic pluralist state, and this self-understanding allows it to legitimately extend the immigrant model to national minorities. Conversely, the French or Germans understand themselves as nation-states built around a core ethnonational group, and this self-understanding allows them to legitimately resist forms of ethnic pluralism.

This, of course, relates to Walzer’s broader metaethical approach, which ties justice to the common meanings and shared self-understandings that are said to characterize political communities, where (allegedly) “language, history, and culture come together” to “produce a collective consciousness.”29 It seems clear that Walzer wants to give states room to act upon such national self-understandings, and this may explain why he resists a group-differentiated theory of minority rights.

Conclusion

To fully address the question of the appropriate role of national self-understandings in moral argument would require a very different article, raising issues that are addressed in the broader literature on Walzer’s account of social criticism and interpretative ethics. Let me simply make two quick comments. First, while Western states do indeed have such nationally-specific self-understandings of pluralism, it is also part of their self-understanding that they are liberal democracies, upholding nationally anonymous values of freedom, equality, and democracy. And those values, I believe, push us in the direction of a group-differentiated theory of minority rights. This is the conclusion reached not only by various liberal theorists of minority rights but also by the international community, reflected in the proliferation of international declarations, conventions, and charters of group-differentiated minority rights, all of which affirm that such rights contribute to liberal-democratic values.30 It may be that the logic of liberal-democratic group-differentiated rights conflicts with the national narratives of particular Western states. If so, then we have a tension within the shared meanings held by citizens of these states. Citizens view themselves as members in good standing of the family of liberal democracies, upholding nationally anonymous values of freedom and equality, and these push in the direction of a liberal-democratic group-differentiated multiculturalism. Yet they also view themselves as bearers of nationally specific “stories of peoplehood” that push against these forms of multiculturalism.31 A focus on the importance of shared meanings does not resolve this issue, since both the nationally anonymous liberal values and the distinctive national narratives are central to the shared meanings and self-understandings of the society. I see no grounds, even within Walzer’s own metaethics, for saying that the latter should trump the former.

Second, even if we set aside nationally anonymous liberal values and focus instead just on the historic national narratives, we need to question Walzer’s assumption that these narratives rest upon a singular and undifferentiated approach to diversity. For example, it is not true that the United States has historically applied the same principle of post-ethnic pluralism to immigrants, Puerto Ricans, and American Indians, or that multination federations, such as Switzerland and Canada, apply the same principle of autonomy to immigrants as to their historic minorities. It may well be true that Americans often downplay or ignore these differences when they imagine their country, particularly in highly ritualized or rhetorical contexts. But in practice, when confronted with the real world challenges of deep diversity, the United States—like every other Western democracy—recognizes the need to distinguish different types of minorities. Thus, the image of being a “post-ethnic” state is just that—a collective imaginary or myth—and not at all the operative principle that guides legislators and court cases. In his general account of “spheres of justice,” Walzer emphasizes that we identify shared meanings of justice in part by looking at actual practices of how goods are distributed in order to identify the normative logic that is embedded in these practices. If we apply this method to the field of ethnic diversity, it becomes clear that in the United States, as elsewhere, the operative normative logic is group-differentiated. Yet Walzer ignores or sets aside these group-differentiated practices, and does not attempt to understand their underlying normative logic. Instead, he appeals to a highly ritualized and rhetorical collective imaginary as the basis for his shared meanings. Here again, I see no grounds, even within Walzer’s own metaethics, for privileging ritualized collective imaginaries over operative practices as the basis for identifying shared meanings.

In short, even if we start from national self-understandings—and I agree with Walzer that in many argumentative contexts we have no other possible starting point—I believe there are factors that lead us in a group-differentiated direction. These national self-understandings may contain a ritualized self-image that obscures group differences, but they also contain (1) a commitment to nationally anonymous liberal-democratic norms of justice that underpin claims to group-differentiated rights; and (2) well-established and historically rooted norms and practices of group-differentiated rights. Whether we ascend to the abstract levels of ideal theories of justice or descend to a contextual study of each country’s traditions, in either case we quickly uncover reasons for shifting from a state-differentiated to a group-differentiated approach.32

Notes

1 This is just a small subset of the relevant declarations, conventions, and charters. For a more comprehensive description, see Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

2 Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); Jeff Spinner-Halev, The Boundaries of Citizenship: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the Liberal State (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); Joseph Carens, Culture, Citizenship and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice as Evenhandedness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Anne Phillips, The Politics of Presence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For a useful collection that surveys the field, see Anthony Laden and David Owen, eds., Multiculturalism and Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

3 Jacob Levy, “Michael Walzer on Political, Moral, and Cultural Pluralism,” in Yitzhak Benbaji and Naomi Sussmann, eds., Reading Walzer: Sovereignty, Culture, and Justice (London: Routledge, forthcoming).

4 Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 28.

5 Levy, “Michael Walzer on Political, Moral, and Cultural Pluralism.” My own version of this criticism of Walzer is elaborated in Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), ch. 11.

6 For versions of this sort of typology, see Spinner-Halev, Boundaries of Citizenship; Carens, Culture, Citizenship and Community; Jacob Levy, The Multiculturalism of Fear (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, Citizenship (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

7 Charles Taylor, “Shared and Divergent Values,” in Ronald L. Watts and Douglas M. Brown, eds., Options for a New Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 53–76.

8 I take the phrase “nationally anonymous” liberal values from Christian Joppke, “The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and Policy,”British Journal of Sociology 55, no. 2 (2004), pp. 237–57.

9 More accurately, it treats Western liberal democracies as an undifferentiated category, on the assumption that they are all constitutionally committed to nationally anonymous principles of freedom, equality, and democracy. This raises an interesting question about whether or how one can extend theories of minority rights to nonliberal or nondemocratic states. I return to this below.

10 For versions of this critique, see James Johnson, “Why Respect Culture?”American Journal of Political Science 44, no. 3 (2000), pp. 405–18; and Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

11 For a detailed discussion of the “targeted” nature of European minority rights norms, see Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys.

12 See, e.g., Jane K. Cowan, Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, and Richard A. Wilson, eds., Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and the voluminous debate around essentialist assumptions in the international legal discourse of indigeneity (e.g., Adam Kuper, “The Return of the Native,”Current Anthropology 44, no. 3 [2003], pp. 389–402).

13 Ted Robert Gurr, Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflict (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Peace Press, 1993); and Ted Robert Gurr, Peoples versus States: Minorities at Risk in the New Century (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Peace Press, 2000).

14 Michael Walzer, “States and Minorities,” in Charles Fried, ed., Minorities: Community and Identity (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1983), p. 227.

15 Michael Walzer, “Pluralism in Political Perspective,” in Michael Walzer, Edward T, Kantowicz, John Higham, and Mona Harrington, The Politics of Ethnicity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 6–7.

16 Ibid., p. 9.

17 Ibid., pp. 9–10.

18 Ibid., pp. 10–11.

19 Walzer, “States and Minorities,” p. 224.

20 See, e.g., Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 20–21.

21 Actually, Walzer’s views on the appropriate norms for the treatment of immigrants in Old World nation-states like France have evolved over time—compare Walzer, “Pluralism in Political Perspective,” to Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), to Michael Walzer, “Nation States and Immigrant Societies,” in Will Kymlicka and Magda Opalski, eds., Can Liberal Pluralism Be Exported? Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 150–53. It would take me too far afield to track these changes, which I do not think affect the more basic issue of the choice between state-differentiated and group-differentiated approaches.

22 Walzer, “Nation-States and Immigrant Societies,” p. 153. For other statements of this commitment to a post-ethnic pluralism in the United States, see Michael Walzer, What It Means to Be an American: Essays on the American Experience (New York: Marsilio, 1992); Michael Walzer, “The New Tribalism,”Dissent (Spring 1992), pp. 164–71; and Michael Walzer, “Multiculturalism and Individualism,”Dissent (Spring 1994), pp. 185–91.

23 Walzer, “Nation-States and Immigrant Societies.”

24 Walzer, “Pluralism in Political Perspective,” pp. 27–28.

25 Ibid., p. 27, my emphasis.

26 For a similar critique, see Bonnie Honig, “Democracy and Foreignness: Democratic Cosmopolitanism and the Myth of an Immigrant America,” in Laden and Owen, eds., Multiculturalism and Political Theory, pp. 373–407. Honig argues that Walzer’s approach to minority rights “normatively privileges one particular trajectory to citizenship: from immigrant to citizen. [This] account captures something about American democracy, while also missing a great deal. American democracy is founded not only on immigration, but also on conquest (Native Americans) and slavery (the forced importation of African slave labor), and, in the post-founding era, on expansion (Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, etc.), annexation (French settlements in Illinois, St. Louis, and New Orleans as well as a significant Spanish-speaking population in the southwest as a result of the war with Mexico)” (p. 375). As she notes, while “Walzer does invite these other groups to become part of his immigrant America,” he “never asks whether his normative privileging of the immigrant-ethnic-citizen trajectory to membership, and the invitation to adapt to it, may itself obscure particular claims, injustices, and bases of organization for specific groups” (p. 386, n. 33).

27 This is an important point in relation to the “essentialism” critique mentioned earlier. Both within normative theories of liberal multiculturalism and within contemporary international law, minority rights are understood precisely as rights, not duties. Indigenous peoples have a right to seek land claims or self-government rights, but they are under no duty to do so if they would prefer instead to participate through an ethnic pluralism model. Similarly, national minorities have a right to claim official language status and regional autonomy if they so choose, but are under no duty to make these claims if these aspirations are not present in the group. Neither liberal theory nor international law is compatible with assigning duties of cultural preservation on people who no longer wish to preserve their language or cultural practices. A theory of minority rights, however, ensures that this is indeed their own choice, to be resolved by democratic debate and decision-making within the group, and not something decided for them by the state.

28 Walzer, “Nation-States and Immigrant Societies,” p. 153.

29 Walzer, Spheres of Justice, p. 28.

30 For a more detailed exposition of how international organizations link group-differentiated minority rights to core liberal-democratic values, see Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys.

31 For an interesting discussion of the “stories of peoplehood” that countries tell themselves, see Rogers Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

32 What about countries that do not view themselves as members of the family of liberal democracies? In these contexts, both liberal theories of multiculturalism and international legal norms of minority rights may well be perceived as an external imposition at odds with local self-understandings. Indeed, I am not optimistic about the prospects for an international consensus on these issues, in part for this reason. However, even here I think we should be cautious about jumping too quickly to the assumption that the problem lies at the level of different shared meanings of justice. In reality, most minority rights claims can be understood by appeal to very elementary and widely accepted norms of fairness and reciprocity—majorities around the world are doing things to minorities that they would never want done to themselves. One need not be a liberal to see the injustice in that. So the opposition to international norms of minority rights is not so much the inability to find a widely accepted idea of justice to underpin these claims, but rather the fact that these claims objectively pose a much greater threat to individual well-being and collective security in some countries than in others. Within the consolidated liberal democracies, the risks of adopting minority rights are relatively small; in much of the rest of the world, the risks of violence or instability are much higher. This provides ample grounds for being cautious about exporting Western models of multiculturalism, but we misidentify the problem if we assume that it is only or primarily a matter of different cultural values or different understandings of justice. See Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys, chs. 6 and 7.

Kymlicka, Will (2000), ‘Le droit des minorités et le multiculturalisme: l’évolution du débat anglo-américain’, Comprendre, Revue de philosophie et de sciences sociales, (1), 141-72.

145: Des sondages d’opinion montrent que, bien loin de s’opposer aux principes libéraux, les minorités ne se distinguent pas des majorités d’un point de vue statistique dans leur attachement à ces principes. Cela est certainement vrai s’agissant des minorités nationales: les valeurs politiques des minorités catalane, écossaise ou québécoise sont quasiment identiques à celles des majorités espagnole, anglaise ou canadienne. De même les populations noire et blanche aux Etats-Unis partagent les mêmes principes politiques et manifestent le même engagement à l’égard de la Constitution et du Bill of Rights.