Before the Quiet Revolution [1960–6], the Québécois generally shared a rural,
Catholic, conservative, and patriarchal conception of the good. Today, after a
period of liberalization, most people have abandoned this traditional way of life,
and Québécois society now exhibits all the diversity that any modern society
contains... to be a Québécois today, therefore, simply means being a participant
in the francophone society of Quebec.
(Kymlicka, 1995: 87)
In the absence of an adequate theorisation of culture it is not clear whether the
example of Quebec can help us to see whether ‘cultural membership’ enhances or
diminishes freedom. After all, the struggle within Quebec is fundamentally over
language, and although the freedom of one linguistic community is threatened by
the other, the capacity to use language, whether it is French or English, is
fundamental to human autonomy. Other dimensions of culture, such as religion,
may not contain the same freedom-enhancing potential. Quebec shows that a culture
canbe liberal, but it does not establish that a culture is necessarilyliberal.
Kymlicka argues that individuals should have rights to cultural membership.
Rights are central to a liberal polity, and for the purposes of this discussion we can
define a right as an advantage held against another (or others). Kymlicka distin-
guishes between three different types of right: self-government rights, polyethnic
rights and special representation rights. Self-government rights usually entail the
devolution of power to a political unit ‘substantially controlled by the members of
an ethnic minority’ (Kymlicka, 1995: 30). Examples of polyethnic rights would be
state funding of ‘cultural institutions’ and exemptions from certain policies, such
as those relating to the slaughter of animals (Kymlicka, 1995: 31). Special represen-
tation rights are intended to ensure the fair representation of minority groups
(Kymlicka, 1995: 32). Each of these types of rights, but especially the first two, can
take the form of an ‘internal restriction’ or an ‘external protection’ (Kymlicka, 1995:
35–44). Kymlicka maintains that empirical evidence shows most campaigns for
cultural recognition take the form of a demand for external protections from wider
society, rather than restricting the freedom of the members of that culture, and so
are compatible with liberalism (Kymlicka, 1995: 38–40). The basic problem is
that rights are a specific cultural form, and the effects of rights on a culture depend
on how one conceptualises culture. If cultures are integral patterns (Benedict,
2006) then rights may well upset those patterns. If, on the other hand, we conceive
culture(s) as overlapping semiotic relationships (Geertz, 1993) then we have a
different problem: rights imply a uniform legal system and yet a semiotic theory of
culture suggests that interpretation may be relativistic.
Constitutional diversity (James Tully)
Tully’s work has the virtue of making explicit its anthropological and philosophical
presuppositions: from anthropology he defends the semiotic theory of Geertz against
what he calls the ‘stages’ – that is, evolutionary – theory of nineteenth-century
‘imperialists’, and from philosophy he draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later
language theory.
Constitutional uniformity (or modern constitutionalism) is the object of Tully’s
attack, and modern political thinkers are (largely) its proponents. Modern
Chapter 15 Multiculturalism 345