Zones of Religion The multicultural riddle: rethinking national, ethnic, and religious identi- ethnic identity or ethnicity, and by religion as a basis of culture.
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- The multicultural riddle : rethinking national, ethnic, and religious identities
- The Multicultural Riddle_ Rethi - Gerd Baumann, Guides for Sociology. University of Reading
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Open to the public Book English Victoria University. None of your libraries hold this item. Found at these bookshops Searching - please wait True, culture maketh man, but it is men, women, and youths who make culture. If they ceased to make it and remake it, culture would cease to be; and all making of culture, no matter how conservative, is also a remaking. Even at 25 The Multicultural Riddle its most conservative, it places old habits in new contexts, and it thus changes the significance of these habits. Just as often, people change and adjust, fine-tune and rework the habits themselves.
One need not go far to find endless examples: In the space of twenty years, every single culture changes its ways of speaking, celebrating birthdays or community occasions, treating students or the unemployed, going through childbirth or funerals, dealing with nature or space, and even viewing their culture in the abstract.
If culture is not the same as cultural change, then it is nothing at all. Culture in this second understanding, which may be called the processual, is not so much a photocopy machine as a concert, or indeed a historically improvised jam session. It only exists in the act of being performed, and it can never stand still or repeat itself without changing its meaning.
This processual view has found its way into the social sciences, especially where they rely on intensive fieldwork and the practices of participant observation Borofsky It is equally evident in quantitative methods such as questionnaires that tell us of, say, changing food tastes among the French or changing views on contraception among Catholics.
In doing empirical research, whether on multiculturalism or anything else, the photocopy view of culture must always be represented: After all, it is the more widespread, and informants will volunteer it most readily. Yet it is represented not as a truth, but as one of the things that our informants, or the people we corepresent, believe and enact.
It forms part of the multicultural riddle that we need to solve, but it is not the solution of that riddle. We shall try to do justice to both views in chapter 7. With the multicultural triangle thus laid out and its enigmatic center pencilled in, it is possible now to examine in more detail the first pole of power, the nation-state.
We can uncover two problems: The Multicultural Triangle relation because of the rationalist and secularist traditions of the modern state. Let us take each problem in turn over the next two chapters. Some of this work is discussed in chapter 5. The best summary and the most interesting updates of these fifty years of work are presented in three exhaustive surveys of the vast anthropological literature: Ethnicity and Nationalism by Thomas Eriksen ; Ethnicity: Excerpts from many of the classic contributions are reprinted in: Ethnicity, edited by Hutchinson and Smith Readers who wish not to dive too deep into this sea of scholarship are best served by reading Jenkins , which addresses most of the salient questions.
Further Reading Asad, Talal. Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, ed. Johns Hopkins University Press. Identity, Categorization, and Power.
The multicultural riddle : rethinking national, ethnic, and religious identities
Why Nation-States Are Not Ethnically Neutral The mind of this city [-state of Athens] is so noble and free and so powerful and healthy…because we are pure Hellenes and not commingled with barbarians. Menexos, according to Plato [ca. John Jay, , in Hamilton et al. No one can divide the children of the same family. Likewise, no one can divide Viet-Nam. This sweet-andsour mix can serve as one of the delicacies of the historical and linguistic imagination. Let us see in detail how it has been cooked up. This form is a latecomer in human history, and it is only over the past one hundred years that every bit of the globe has been claimed by one state or another, sometimes two.
States are the things we pay taxes to, pledge allegiance to, accept laws from, and get passports or visas to enter—all because they claim a territorial monopoly on coercive force. Nationality, which is recognized or denied by each state on its own rules, entitles a person to a passport; this passport can, although it need not, entitle the person to citizenship, but this citizenship is always selective: Not everyone may have it. The rest is legal argument. What, however, is a nation-state; or, what is a nation? In case this sounds surprisingly simple, let us compare what the two words, ethnic group or tribe on the one hand and nation on the other, are found to mean in different languages.
The table below is based on a comparison of dictionary definitions in twelve languages, which include Indo-European languages such as English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, and others, and Arabic and Chinese. As the table shows, the same set of criteria is used to define what the two concepts mean. Said to be acquired from birth Forming a community of destiny and some form of political organization Nation Based on descent Often recognizable by looks Sharing cultural traits language, outlook, etc.
Said to be acquired from birth Forming a community of destiny on the basis of a state Not every dictionary lists all characteristics for both concepts: Yet every dictionary consulted lists at least five of the criteria, and the lists run in parallel except for the criteria of political or state organization. The homology is striking, but the explanation is simple. Since modern nation-states arose in the West, roughly from AD onward, they had to overcome the boundaries of ethnicity among their citizens, and they did so by turning the nation into a superethnos.
The nation is thus both postethnic, in that it denies the salience of old ethnic distinctions and portrays these as a matter of a dim and distant prestate past, and superethnic, in that it portrays the nation as a new and bigger kind of ethnos. Most nation-states, however, have failed to complete this project in that they included some ethnic groups and excluded others, or privileged some and marginalized others. Every nation-state has one superethnos, called the Germans, the French, or the American 31 The Multicultural Riddle people, whose members think they have founded it or should have a special role in running it.
To be truly postethnic, that is, truly inclusive, the nation-state would have to cease constructing its nation as a superethnos. A multicultural nation-state is, in some ways, a contradiction in terms. Yet like all conclusions from logic, this sounds more gloomy than it really is. True, no state is perfect, and real multiculturalism would have to be global—just as environmentalism and feminism need to be global to succeed. It is equally true, however, that every Western nation-state has made some headway, over the past twenty years, in encouraging a multicultural culture.
How could they succeed in this when certain ethnic groups were excluded or marginalized in every nation-state we know? There are probably two answers to this. One is welfare, the other is mystique. The first is economic and is based upon the rationalist philosophy of the modern state. The second is ideological and is based on the romantic roots of the nation-state. By the first answer, loosely called welfare, I mean the achievement of Western states to keep most people from starving. The nationstate in the West has been able, despite the official end of colonialism and the real end of full employment, to house and feed almost all, or all that had a political voice.
This was not so much an act of charity as an act of self-preservation. The world order of nation-states would have collapsed long ago had not state elites bought off the poor and the minorities—conveniently, often the same people. If the West were poor, ethnic conflicts would certainly be far more bloody than they are; there is plenty of evidence all around us that poverty and increased competition for scarce resources increase intra-ethnic solidarities 32 The Nation-State, I: If ethnic belonging becomes a resource in economic competition, then ethnic radicalization is an all but inevitable consequence.
The nation-state of the West has invested all its multicultural credentials into projecting itself as the greatest shopping mall of all, a selfless postethnic provider of economic services for everyone. It portrays itself, often convincingly, as a value-free dispenser of well-being and justice regardless of culture, that is, as a kind of postethnic bargain basement. Individual citizens may believe this or not, and even whole communities of citizens may cast doubt on the postethnic welfare achievement of the state.
Yet the recourse to legally enforceable civil rights has been improved almost everywhere. State elites have improved upon their past records of racism or systematic negligence, and most citizens can now hope, or successfully fight, for equal rights of access to state welfare provisions. This is a strong argument for the postethnic character of the Western nation-state.
That said, however, we face a historical paradox, or at least a bill that neither the state, nor the rich, are prepared to pay. Western nation-state elites wish to promise social security for all alike. They compete on this promise on party lines, and no party is happy to lose. Yet there is still no such thing as a free lunch.
Nation-state elites need to motivate the people they wish to govern so that their citizens remain prepared to chip in their share of taxes for the greater good and, if need be, surrender their private moral scruples for the greater national glory. All this is done, not in the name of the state as such, let alone of its governing elites. Nor is it done in the name of any one of the privileged ethnic groups. Rather, it is at this point of moral commitment and community building that the idea of nation comes into its own.
In appealing to national consciousness and conscience, the state can be portrayed as the servant, not of the privileged ethnic groups within it, but of the all-inclusive megaethnicity called nation. It thus creates its own mystique of a new and all-inclusive postethnic community.
Romantic folk nationalism has its deepest roots in Europe, but it is the European states that have gone furthest in disowning their ethno-nationalist heritage. Most Europeans, whether native citizens or immigrants, want the state as a value-free provider of economic services and, please, nothing else. With the sole exception of neofascist splinter groups among the politically retarded, the symbols, rituals, and even the language of ethno-national patriotism have all but vanished from both the public and even the private spheres.
Faced with this paradox, one of my American students even came up with an ethno-national answer: So since everyone is mixed, we can be all the same. It is the multiethnic hybridity of many American citizens that is used to argue for a shared neoethnic endorsement of national unity. Looking for other explanations for this cross-Atlantic shift in the understanding of the nation-state, one would probably turn to historical processes. By the time that Europeans invented their various versions of ethno-nationalism, mostly in the nineteenth century, they had already experienced several centuries of staterun centralized bureaucracies.
These bureaucracies aimed at economic growth for each territorial state, and they tried to organize the distribution of the accruing wealth to protect their 34 The Nation-State, I: They thus concentrated all political and economic power in the hands of absolute rulers. As industrialization made the poor even poorer and turned landless peasants into jobless proletarians, the system exploded in two ways at the same time. Economically, the movements of trade unionists and socialists demanded and forced that the old bureaucratic structures must now actively redistribute the profits from industrial growth.
In the course of one hundred years, roughly speaking from to , all European states became welfare states, that is, states in which the governing elites are held responsible for redistributing economic profits from the richer to the poorer de Swaan In this history, the invention of ethno-nationalism had no chance of succeeding in the long term. It managed to turn territorial states into nation-states and to turn nationalists into colonialists.
Since then, all European nationals have learned, in their own particular ways, that nation-states had little to gain from romantic ethno-nationalism.
- The Multicultural Riddle_ Rethi - Gerd Baumann - Docsity;
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The strength of bureaucratic, centralized, and socialist traditions throughout Europe was harnessed, from about , to serve the project of a European Union. What remnants of ethno-nationalism have been reawakened in Europe can only be understood as a protest against this project of a Europe beyond nations, historically insensitive and bureaucratically heavy-handed as it may be. In America, the trend has run the other way around. Comparing it to European states, 35 The Multicultural Riddle the United States shows none of the three factors that led Europeans to forge their nation-state unities: Thus, forging an American national identity had to depend upon forging an explicitly postethnic national consciousness.
How could this be done? To understand the postethnic mystique of the modern state, it is best to consult the work of Benedict Anderson , a historian at Cornell. What Anderson showed in his book, albeit between the lines, was as simple as it was revealing: Our modern idea of nationhood is a metaphysical concept. It owes its success to succeeding two even more irrational constructs. One of these is the faith in the legitimacy of power that used to be provided by dynasties, such as the Hapsburgs in multiethnic although racist Austria or the Ming in multiethnic although racist China.
On the face of it, it is hard to imagine how the accident of birth could possibly count as a passport to legitimate power. But people believed in it then, and in some ways they believe in it even now. Even the fictional dynasties that we learn to trace in soap operas and romantic novels keep showing us that money is nothing without the legitimacy of descent. The second principle of legitimizing power that Anderson saw to have been replaced by a new nationalist legitimation was, less surprisingly, the power of the churches.
Instead, they bent their backs to work for a better living and send their children to school. These were run by state elites for the rich, by churches for the poor. At the same time, however, the state took over the schools. The school became the school of the nation, in many ways the mission station of national consciousness. It is an arresting contrast to compare literacy training for the young as this transition took place. As long as the churches ran popular schooling, the aim was to read the Bible. In eighteenth-century Sweden, then the country with the highest literacy rate in the world, no one was allowed to be married unless they could read, or pretend to read, the holy book Johansson As soon as the nation-states took over universal schooling, the curricula were enriched with the new sacred legends of national glory.
These could be ancient kings or the Declaration of Independence, great colonial victories or little stories of heroic resistance: In all cases, no matter where, the curriculum became a tool to forge a superethnic, and often newly religious, national consciousness. The philosopher Ernest Gellner, who wrote an influential book on nationalism , recognized this well: The nation-state would be nothing, nowadays, if it had not taken possession of the schools. Yet he also made a strange mistake, claiming that nationalism was the end of all religious sensitivities. What happened was quite the opposite.
Each nation-state invented its own national branch of a worldwide new religion. We shall examine this strange process in the next chapter. For the moment, however, we may cast a smiling sideways glance at how nationalism has shaped even the languages themselves with which we try to go beyond a nationalist view of the world. Nation-state schools turned mother tongues—untidy, regional, and often cross-border as they were—into national languages, standardized and state-bounded as they now are.
What made it fit to act as such was that it shared one peculiar trick with its two predecessors: It could lead people to imagine themselves in community with people they did not know, or possibly even want to know, in daily life. People used to think of themselves as members of a community held together by a dynastic authority, or people used to think of themselves as members of a community of faith. Through the intervention of mother tongue literacy, mass media, and state elites, people began to conceive of themselves as members of a new imagined community—the nation and its state.
The nation is imagined as a community in the sense that membership confers and demands a universal bond of solidarity or, in its typically patriarchal language, brotherhood. This solidarity is imagined in that it encompasses far more people than any individual will ever know or meet. Yet it is nonetheless real for that; witness only the acts of self-sacrifice, as well as the basest beastialities, that people are prepared to commit in the name of their nation.
National consciousness is thus saturated with values and ultimate identifications—just like a religion. Unfortunately, Anderson does not show the historical processes by which these identifications took hold, but he pinpoints two of the key mechanisms that were involved. Since the greatest majority of people do not choose their nationality, national identity tends to appear to them as a matter of ancestry and birth, an attribute that feels as natural as kinship and family do.
We have seen earlier, in chapter 2, that the purportedly biological character of ancestry, kinship, and descent are popular fictions. But this does not detract from their social efficacy. In exploring more deeply the social efficacy of nationalism or national consciousness, we are thus faced with an utterly artificial construction. It is artificial, as opposed to natural, in that it represents an ingenious artifice of the human and social imagination. What is imagined is a community that is ethnic in its history, postethnic in its civil rights and material rights standards, and superethnic to justify its existence for and as a nation.
This superethnic character, however, takes on mystical and almost religious traits. Nationalism, the ideology of one or a few privileged ethnic categories within a state, still disadvantages other ethnic categories in the same state. Even when discrimination is abolished in law, it carries on in daily practice.
Yet the nation-state has not faltered on these failings. How, then, can such a construction be plausible, and how can it motivate actions that people would be too prudent, too cowardly, and sometimes even too decent to commit for their own sakes? The answer must lie in a combination of politico-economic power and national symbolic 39 The Multicultural Riddle persuasiveness.
Let us see how this works, and how each state has been provided with its own national religion or quasireligious nationalism. Further Reading Anderson, Benedict. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
The Multicultural Riddle_ Rethi - Gerd Baumann, Guides for Sociology. University of Reading
The Nature of the Ethnonational Bond. And did the Countenance Divine shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here among these dark satanic mills? Bring Bring Bring Bring me me me me my my my my bow of burning gold! I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand: A Poem in Two Books [London: Sung to one of the finest hymn tunes ever written,1 it encapsulates the dream of turning early industrial England, with its satanically inhuman factory mills, into a free Jerusalem for all.
The feet that Blake mentions are those of Jesus, whom medieval folk traditions believed to have journeyed across England, and the new Jerusalem is a state of justice and equality, a kind of Christian socialism pioneered in one country. There are several parallels, both in Europe and the United States, of likening the nation to the original Chosen People who were promised Jerusalem, that is, the achievement of a divinely just social order on earth.
The thought is not as mad as it looks. When using the rationalist language of costs and benefits, state elites tell their citizens that they provide the best value for money. Pay your taxes, obey our laws, and you will get the best deal available anywhere. When this rationalist language will not do, state elites need to fall back on something more noble, and what can be nobler than a faith that binds all citizens? As we have seen already in designing the multicultural triangle, religion, with its claims to ultimate truths and its potential social divisiveness, is the oldest problem of the nation-state.
What better idea, therefore, than establishing a quasi religion for all citizens? The first and still the most exciting reconnaissance of such a civil religion was written by the eminently [sic] American political scientist Robert Bellah This was a short article only, but it was written at a crucial time. Trying to square his American values with the values of his government practicing genocide on the Vietnamese, he asked the question: Who are we, and what makes us tick? He discovered something astonishing, and he even added a few pages at the end to apply his discovery so as not to seem unpatriotic.
His discovery, which he labeled correctly at once, has remained known ever since as Civil Religion. Their rituals make clear what all their purposive behaviors try to hide. So it is worth looking at rituals twice, and what Bellah came up with was shocking. American civil culture, the least church-ridden of all, was replete with religious-sounding references and rituals. Its commonest means of social exchange, the dollar bill, bears three religious inscriptions and symbols, and its geography is dotted with sacred national places: The seasonal cycle of all its citizens is ordered by sacred national feasts: This is an interesting development: Ironically, the analyst of civil religion turns into a prophet of civil religion at the end of his groundbreaking paper: Bellah endorses the very religion that he has historicized so carefully and invokes it to make his own moral point: A religion that convinces even the analyst must be powerful indeed.
Anderson and Bellah have taken us a long way from the naive belief that the state is but a secular business to service worldly needs. The nation-state tends to be secular-ist, but it is by no means secul-ar. That is, it pushes churches and worship into the private sphere, but the resulting vacuum of mystical rhetoric and ritual is quickly filled up with state-made quasi religion. The nation of each state is constructed as an imagined community, as if it were a supremely moral superethnos writ large, and the nation-state relies upon a web of symbolic values, places, and times that is nothing short of religious.
What can this tell us about the multicultural project? It is one of the cornerstone problems of the multicultural triangle, not its immovable center. This is so because the nation- 44 The Nation-State, I: Schiffauer implies, but he does not use, the notion of civil religion when he compares the four nation-states. His results, however, could fill a book on civil religions. All civil religions, or civil societies, try to solve the same problem that faces all Western nation-states: Western societies glorify the free and rational exchange of all that is useful.
Ideas and favors of power are exchanged in the political forum, economic goods are exchanged in the market place, and traditions and rethinkings about all of these are exchanged on the cultural stage, be it that of theaters or newspapers, TV networks or video shops. This is the most radical system of free exchange known in human history, but it is also the most impudent. Competition has to be public, anonymous, and absolute. This modern rule goes against every old intuition we have. Why should anyone strive for power, or for money or prestige, when they cannot pass it on to the people they know longest and love best?
The logic is inhuman, and so it needs boundaries. It needs to have outsiders, where the rational charity stops; if it has none, it will create some. How these outsiders are created, however, is a matter for each civil society on its own. Americans and Brits, French and Germans, and all other nation-staters to boot, have each created their own civil culture and civil religion to draw a line somehow.
In the United States, where Bellah had done the groundwork, the case appeared most special to Schiffauer, too. Everyone is there to fight, and the state elites are to keep out of the scrum. Whether success is achieved by using ethnic networks or religious ones, family networks or parties, makes little difference: Everyone is there to succeed, and whoever succeeds may pass on his success to anyone he likes.
The civil religion behind this is a faith, rather more Judeo-Protestant than Catholic, that humans are born, but Americans are reborn. In Europe, there are more ancient barriers against this counter-intuitive competition of all against all, no matter who they are or whom they like. On the face of it, this should have meant less emancipation for minorities, but in reality, and perhaps paradoxically, it delivered vastly more in a shorter time. Half of the paradox is explained by the longstanding socialist traditions within European nation-states.
The model of the welfare state has been able to buy in most minorities in most countries. The other half of the paradox is resolved by examining the range of European civil cultures. In Britain, the dominant civil culture does not expect one norm to rule absolute, even the base norm of individual success. Rather, its civil religion is based on a faith in differences, historically grown and never standardized. If America were like a rodeo, where each rider may choose his own helpers but is judged on his own, Britain would be a soccer tournament.
Everyone should fight for a team and fight for it squarely but fairly. Teams, be they ethnic minorities or religious ones, should stick together at all costs, and any individualism is suspected of selfishness. The good citizen fights tough, plays fair, and thinks of his community as a whole. The civil ethos is adversarial; it views fair confrontation 46 The Nation-State, I: These decisions evade matters of principle and instead tend to be pragmatic and particularist. Motorbikers must wear helmets, but Sikh motorbikers may wear their traditional turban; school students must wear uniforms, but Muslim schoolgirls may wear their headscarf, as long as it is in the uniform colors.
The dominant idea of freedom is not an equality of all, but enough acceptable deals to satisfy each community in its own way. It has reacted with a peculiarly moralist, or ethicized, ideal of freedom. It falls to each individual, whether national or foreigner, to cultivate a sense of responsibility for the common good, and indeed to seek his own good in what is best for all. Any collective particularism, as in the British case, or any self-promoting individualism, as in the American case, are frowned upon as irresponsible or selfish.
These attitudes are criticized because they fall short of the dominant moralist ethos. The first deals with shame, the second with competence. The stress that Germans place upon personal ethics is not so much an emphasis directed toward the inside as an emphasis broadcast toward the outside.
Almost all Germans 47 The Multicultural Riddle wish to be seen as postracist, postethnic, and postnationalist. Given the history of their nation-state, which required one hundred years of near-endless wars to put on the map, this culture of collective guilt is not surprising. This dependence also explains one of the most striking characteristics of German civil culture. When all democratic means of resolving conflicts fail, the power of decision must be given, not to the people at large, but to committees of experts. When different sectional interests cannot be reconciled, then the popular will turns to independent professional experts or technocratic committees to provide a responsible compromise.
While experts in Britain are expected to be on tap, their colleagues in Germany are always on top. If German civic culture puts a prize on individual morals, its French counterpart seeks its strength in universal and anonymous competition regulated by an absolute equality of rules. The font of all liberty is equality and the shared faith in reason as such. While each minority in Britain may fight for its own particular deal, all minorities in France are expected to share this common faith in a centralist and antiparticularist cult of one metareligious rationality.
The French revolutionaries turned the cathedral of Paris into a Temple of Reason, and the French state elites have kept reinventing this civil religion of One Reason for All. It is as if the French Republic, which replaced dynastic absolutism with the absolute value of citizenship, had declared ethnic and religious loyalties illegal for all times.
Consider, for instance, the 48 The Nation-State, I: Its purpose was to reason the decision that schoolgirls of Muslim faith must be barred from wearing headscarves at school. Its text, which I have taken the liberty to interpret in italics, is civil religion at its most exclusive: Ministerial Decree to All Directors of State Schools In France, the national project and the republican project have conjoined with each other around a certain idea of citizenship.
Here, where Muslims are foreigners, the politics of right-wingers as well as left-wingers have closed ranks around one idea of the nation-state. This French idea of the nation and the Republic will by its nature respect all convictions, in particular those of religion, politics, and cultural traditions. This idea of Frenchmen, whether right-wing or left-wing must be assumed without question to respect all private beliefs, even those of Muslims, foreigners, and ethnics.
But it excludes the explosion of the nation into separate communities, indifferent to each other, and considering only their own rules and laws, and engaged in simple coexistence. But the idea by itself makes it an act of subversion to recognize within our state a plurality of minorities that do not share our ideas because they are egoistic and ethnocentric. They threaten lawlessness since they wish to live here without becoming French.
The nation is not only a collection of citizens France is more than a country full of people 49 The Multicultural Riddle pursuing individual rights. It is a community of destiny. France is a religion This ideal is pursued first and foremost at schools…. This kind of nationalism is what the state pays for when it funds public schools. This laicist and national ideal is the very substance of the school of the Republic and the foundation of its duty toward civic education.
This ideology, shared between left-wing and right-wing, is the very reason why there are state schools and the reason why the state schools your children. This is why it is impossible at school to accept the presence and the proliferation of signs which are so ostensive that their signification is precisely to separate certain students from the rules of the communal life of the school. Therefore you have no right to enjoy public schooling if your daughters wear veils because these veils spread such offensive messages of cultural difference, that we fear you might opt out of the one-nation agenda of our state schools.
These signs are in themselves elements of proselytism, the more so as they are accompanied by a questioning of certain courses or disciplines, as they jeopardize the security of students, Things like veils are tools of converting others, especially because sometimes girls with veils refuse lessons in sports, swimming, and music. Further, the wearing of veils can lead to violence by right-wing French students, who might get hurt, or as they lead to or disturbances in the common life of the institution….
The presence of more discreet signs, expressing merely the attachment to a personal conviction allowed, cannot be subject to the same reserves…. The Civil Rights Movement has not suddenly stopped: Witness the campaigns for ethnic voter registration and the politics of Jesse Jackson and other Democrats.
There are plenty of remnants both of the civil rights approach and of the ethnic rights approach. No one can know about their relative success in the future. What matters, however, is this: There are three kinds of rights that multiculturalists can fight for, but they are not the same kinds of rights. The differences between them are crucial, and they lie at the heart of the multicultural riddle almost everywhere. Discrimination, as well as forced or expected assimilation, can be fought on three platforms, but each platform defines different allies and adversaries, as well as different insiders and outsiders.
Discrimination can be fought on the civil rights platform because it means inequality among citizens. Alternatively, it can be fought because, and insofar as, it means inequality among ethnic groups or among religious groups. Since these groups of cocitizens, coethnics, and coreligionists have different boundaries, and since they use different arguments to fight inequality, they seek different kinds of equality.
Civil rights movements exclude foreigners, ethnic rights movements exclude so-called non- or half-ethnics, and religious rights movements exclude nonbelievers. The differences between these kinds of rights would not be so worrisome if there were some ultimate kind of right to which proponents of all three could appeal. Such a superlogic of rights does indeed seem to exist, and it is known as human rights. Let us see, therefore, whether the ideology of human rights can serve to unite the proponents of civil, ethnic, and religious rights. To call human rights an ideology, rather than a logic, may sound cynical at first sight.
Ideology, after all, is the word for a kind of self-interested and wishful non thinking. But there are good reasons for this, both cultural-historical and present-day legal. To show their cultural-historical specificity, one may think of the human rights debates in the United Nations. Whenever democratic states chastise police states for their violations of human rights, the answer rings loud and clear: It is foreign interference in another state's internal affairs.
The victims, be they oppressed minorities or political prisoners, child laborers or women not treated as the equals of men, would probably want their human rights to be. Yet state elites can reject them whenever it suits them, and they do so by pointing to their cultural-historical specificity.
A more credible critique of the human rights concept can be advanced from within the Western framework itself, and it shows that human rights are neither universal, nor even rights. To dig up their cultural-historical roots, one may best consult the great Thomas Paine, the first truly international radical, who coinspired the American Constitution, the French Revolution, and other democratic movements right across the West.
In his famous treatise, The Rights of Man , Tom Paine argued in a deliberately multicultural way: This is a fine thing to believe, but all the evidence we have goes against it: From the book of Genesis to the creation myths of thousands of "unlettered," that is, oral, cultures, we see creation imagined as a hierarchical process, be it between the genders or between ethnic groups, between believers and pagans or between nobles and commoners. Paine himself knew this perfectly well, and to get out of the fix, he had to invent a new philosophy of creation that even denied the relevance of having sex.
Apart from the historical and cultural reasons for calling it so, there are very hard legal reasons too. The best examination of these reasons comes from Marie-Benedicte Dembour, an anthropologist as well as a lecturer in international law. Dembour indeed uses the word "ideology" herself; as a lawyer she must admit that "human rights are first and foremost political aspirations We end up with the same sad conclusion that we faced in United Nations diplomacy, only this time on better authority: Human rights can only be enjoyed within the boundaries set by nation-states, and nation-states are even worse at protecting human rights than they are at guaranteeing civil rights.
The record is bad. Dembour gives two very poignant examples of people excluded from human rights by national laws: It is left up to every nationstate to interpret whether a migrant is classified as an "economic migrant" usually thrown out or a "political refugee" sometimes let in. It is also left up to every nation-state to restrict the rules under which a recognized political refugee is granted the "universal human right" of political asylum. But more than that, matters are just as bad for those who want to, or can, stay at home.
The only human rights treaty that is indeed binding in law, the European Convention on Human Rights , again proves the old adage of the law as an ass: The ultimate legal authorities often "disagree whether facts submitted to them [may or may not] constitute violations of human rights guaranteed by the European Convention" Dembour , 36n. Neither Dembour nor I, nor any of the commentators I know, disagree with the moral value of "thinking" human rights. Dembour makes a passionate plea to cast away our ambivalence toward the idea, and Donnelly, who calls all human rights claims "essentially extralegal" , 14 even tried out a Thomas Paine-like construction of "human dignity" to find some universal, culturally neutral, common ground Donnelly But wish as we may, and dream as we must, the superlogic of human rights remains an ideology in every way.
Historically and culturally, it rests on mythical thinking, however well intentioned; legally, it remains subject to the powers of nation-state elites, however well intentioned or selfish. What human rights we may have, we can only enforce by the grace of our nation- states, and all that a government needs to renege on them is an obedient police force within, an effective immigration "service" at its borders, and a lying diplomat at the United Nations.
If we had hoped that the logic of human rights might somehow render civil rights, ethnic rights, and religious liberties the same, we have bet on a lame horse. This, at least, is the lawyers' advice. We thus keep in hand three logics of equality that differ fundamentally. One is based on individualist, but legally enforceable, civil rights; the second on ethnic identity; and the third on religious equality.
Let us therefore review these three kinds of rights briefly. Civil rights are legally enforceable claims of a citizen, that is, not a person as such, but a person with a particular passport or national status. The idea has its roots in the ancient Greek citystates and in the Roman Empire state, but civil rights were hardly distinguishable in these contexts from ethnic or religious rights. Their reinvention for modern times was one of the great achievements of critical thinkers around These thinkers, among them John Locke and Tom Paine in Britain and Charles Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France, invented the idea of a basic social contract between individuals and the state.
This contract was envisaged as individuals giving up certain rights to the state and receiving selected other rights in return. Give up your right to carry a gun, and you get the right to be protected by a policeman; give up your right to sleep around, and gain the right to have your marriage protected by law.
To have rights was thus the result of a deal: Natural persons join a state and give up natural rights; natural persons become citizens and get civil rights in return. If civil rights fail to respect people's natural rights, citizens have the right to overturn their government. To us, of course, it is obvious that we are dealing with a philosophical fiction.
What these thinkers confused, but confused quite deliberately to win the argument, was human society in general and the state in particular. We do, of course, surrender some of our desires to society at large: Most of us call that "civilization," and it leads to ideas about self-control, public and private property, and the peaceful resolution of conflicts.
But compromising to live in human society is, nonetheless, something different than subordinating oneself to a state. What the Enlightenment thinkers tried to do with this line of arguing was to demote the state and all its might to acting as a mere servant of the common good. They deliberately confused the nationstate with governance in general, the better to cut the state down to size. The great advantage was to reduce the state to being a partner in a social bargain. To honor that bargain, states had to render civil rights enforceable in the courts and promise all citizens equal treatment by all its powers.
All citizens who enjoy civil rights must be equal before the lawmakers, or legislature; before the judges of the law, or jurisdiction; and before the executive and civil service. Despite its checkered argument, the civil rights approach is thus not to be discounted in the struggle for equality. As a sole platform, however, it looks insufficient. There are tens of millions of illegal immigrants in the Western states, and there are tens of millions of legal immigrants who, nonetheless, are not nationals and are thus denied full civil rights.
Neither of these groups will simply go back to where they originated, either because they have even fewer civil rights in their countries of birth or because Western economies make very good use of them. On top of that, there are tens of millions of full-status nationals living in their own Western countries that have been prevented from relying on the same civil rights as their neighbors. In the European states, the problem is mainly about the first and second cases: In America, it is mainly about the first and the third: The differences in history and in law are immense, but the bot tom line seems to be the same across the board.
Civil rights alone are not the way to achieve equality for all. This is why, in America first and in Europe slightly later, dissatisfied citizens were forced to invent community rights. Community rights differ from civil rights in the boundaries that they draw. It is no longer the fact of having national citizenship that matters in the struggle for equal rights. Rather, in this logic, the struggle for equality is based on a particular group identity. This identity can be based on two main criteria, ethnicity or religion.
Each of these two can assume a particular political force vis-a-vis the nation-state. Both community-based calls for equal rights sound irrational at first, and they still sound irrational for many nation-state elites: What can ethnic origin or religious conviction have to do with civil equality?
Yet the answer is simple, and it is underwritten also by the staunchest defenders of community-neutral civil rights Wilson Given the long history of inequality and discrimination in every state we know, the enforcement of civil rights appears to require "affirmative action. What affirmative action was originally expected to affirm was, quite simply, equal access to civil rights.
It was to make up for the faults of history by remedial public action, taken consensually and for the common good. One could call it a logical rectification of history. What it has come to affirm, however, is not a universal faith in civil rights, but the faith of ethnic and religious communities in their right to determine their own destiny. This dialectic twist is not as surprising as it sounds: If initiatives are aimed at one or another community, that commu nity will also be organized, mobilized, and come to be thought of as a social body with its own particular rights.
In this way, affirmative action comes to affirm precisely that which civil rights were supposed to overcome: This does not mean that one has to be against affirmative action. What it shows, however, is that the logic of civil rights and the logic of community rights, including affirmative action, are two different logics. There is no way of solving the multicultural riddle if we fudge the differences and treat one sort of rights as "bascially the same" as the other two. This conflation however, is a very fashionable fallacy. Spokespersons for the rights of religious communities appeal to their believers' faith in civil rights, spokespersons for ethnic rights translate their message into religious rights, and those who speak for a civil rights approach sell civil rights as the way toward ethnic or religious community rights.
Time and again, it appears politically. There are good reasons for this, for it makes everyone's arguments more elastic and renders compromises more flexible. At the same time, however, it can lead to the most paradoxical and counterproductive results. The clearest examples of such a strategy of confusion are found in Europe, rather than in America, for two contradictory reasons.
To start with, European states have a much longer history of ethnic or religious discrimination despite formal declarations of legal equality.
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Racism and communalism went on long after the formal recognition of equal civil rights for all. In America, by contrast, civil equality was denied even in principle to African Americans until and in effect, much longer and denied to Native Americans until in effect, again, much longer. In most of Europe, such systematic exclusions from civil rights turned more and more unpractical in a climate of competitive industrialization. In fact, some states that oppressed their minorities lost their best entrepreneurial elites to more liberal states.
One may think of the French Huguenot refugees who were outlawed for the second time in , proceded to emigrate in large numbers, and soon contributed enormously to the economies of Holland and Prussia, as well as America. Conversely, however, and this is the second reason, present-day European states cannot solve their current problems of inequality by simply reinforcing civil rights because most of their ethnic and religious minorities today are recent arrivals, and thus not citizens at all. Virtually all European states, with the main exception of Great Britain, replicate this constellation of disadvantaged minorities that do not hold national citizenship and thus civil rights.
The unification of the European Community has alleviated some of these problems by encouraging member-states to treat each other's nationals like their own, regardless of the member-state from which they come. Yet these multinational legal agreements remain limited, and at any rate they do not affect the far more disadvantaged minorities that hail from beyond the European Community-Eastern Europe and the Balkans, North Africa and Turkey, Indochina and South Asia. To remedy systematic inequalities is thus again a matter of addressing and targeting these nonnationals as ethnic or religious communities, instead of as citizens.
To get a feel for the resulting contradictions, it may be useful to throw a brief glance at two cases. Probably the oldest and most odd example of fudging civil rights and religious community rights is found in the Netherlands from around to the present van Rooden At the risk of oversimplifying four hundred years of a complicated history, I shall accentuate some key points of immediate multicultural interest.
Around , the Netherlands was the center of the capitalist world, with Amsterdam counting a third of world trade as its own and a third of its inhabitants as immigrants. There, the largely self- governing cities, such as Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Haarlem, faced citizenries of equal civic standing, but administered welfare rights and economic perks according to their citizens' religious communities.
Some were treated better than others, but none was left entirely without a stake in the system. Even the so-called sects of Armenians and Anabaptists, as well as the Jewish community, were awarded welfare rights, and sometimes civic perks, on the basis of their religious affiliations. In the course of time ca. This was vastly better than the oppression of religious minorities elsewhere, and it probably spurred the famous "Dutch tolerance.
The modernizing state was squeezed into a coma by a pincer movement between what might be called the religious right and the religious left-the Catholics, who had had a rough deal in the past, and the ultra-Protestants, who feared they might get one in the future. For the formative one hundred years of industrialization and nation-building ca. Instead, it worked like a trust bank for three religious communities or "pillars" of national society: Catholics, so-called Orthodox Protestants, and the neither-nors who had to organize as if they, too, were a religious community.
This dissolution of civil politics into a religious "pillarization" ran out of steam in the s, but it has an influence on Dutch citizens' ideas about multiculturalism even now. The largest groups of nonnationals are from Turkey and from Morocco, and they have precious little in common except that both groups are Muslim. For most native Dutch, however, the problem of multiculturalism has become a problem of how to integrate or pacify Muslims as such. The upshot is simple: It is Islam as such that most citizens now see as the multicultural problem and most conservatives see as a threat to Dutch values.
The British example of conflating civil rights and community rights is remarkable because it is largely unnecessary. Britain is unique in Western comparison in that almost all its minority citizens are entitled to the status of nationals and thus share the same right to equal civil rights. Yet strangely and paradoxically, it is Britain that has gone furthest on the path away from a civil rights approach. While this has historical reasons,4 it is nonetheless an astonishing example of what happens when civil rights give way to ethnic or religious rights. Britain has an institution called "The Muslim Parliament," as if Muslims were not represented at Westminster, the famed "Mother of Parliaments"; its governing Labour Party has a special "Black Section," as if there were a white and a nonwhite version of social democracy; and Britain has local authorities that involve temples and mosques in administering the naturalization of overseas migrants into British citizens Baumann b.
None of these things are bad by themselves if one takes a closer look, and every country has, so far, been stuck with its own national multiculturalism, as we shall see in chapters 3 and 4. Yet what these details show is the opposite of a color-blind, culture-blind, or religion-blind-and thus secular-modern state. To sum up, both of these European examples of putting community rights in the place of civil rights are, in their own ways, examples of affirmative action, even when they date several hundred years back.
Ethnic or religious community rights are thus nothing new in modern states, but they are clearly something radically different from civil rights. It may matter little to the person whether she enjoys a right as a citizen, as an ethnically distinguishable person, or as a member of some congregation or other. A right is a right- who cares where it comes from?