Cultural majority rights: Has multiculturalism been turned upside down?

Introduction: multiculturalism at fifty

In this special issue celebrating the 20^th anniversary of the University of Bristol’s Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, it is opportune to remember another important anniversary. ¹ Fifty years ago, in October 1971, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau declared multiculturalism to be an official policy of the federal government. Australia was the next state to adopt the concept as a label for government policy in 1973. European states followed with considerable delay, with the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK as the only three countries where multiculturalism was officially embraced to some extent in the 1980s and 1990s. Remarkably, all European states have more or less abandoned the concept since, even if few of the policies that were introduced under this label have been reversed. In the early 2000s and in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, several prominent European political leaders – among them those of countries like Germany (Angela Merkel) and France (Nicola Sarkozy) that had never adopted official multiculturalism in the first place – declared the idea dead and policies pursuing it as having failed (see also Triandafyllidou, in this issue). Only Canada still proudly proclaims to be a multicultural nation.

Even in Canada, however, the concept was always contested. In Quebec, it was often criticized as a ploy by the Trudeau government to diminish the status of French as a second official language and the claims of Quebec to be a ‘distinct society’ and one of the two founding nations of modern Canada. Multiculturalism was (generally wrongly) perceived as an attempt to erase the differences between the distinct claims of Francophones, indigenous peoples and immigrant groups (Kymlicka, 1995, 1998). Quebecois policy-makers have promoted the term ‘interculturalism’ as an alternative to multiculturalism, claiming that their approach to diversity resulting from immigration is more integrative, but also highlighting the special status of the dominant Francophone culture that is open for intercultural dialogue with minorities in its territory (Bouchard 2011). Interculturalism as an alternative to multiculturalism has also resonated in Catalonia and for much the same reasons why Quebecois liberal nationalists found it attractive (Zapata-Barrero 2016). Authors defending multiculturalism, such as Tariq Modood in Britain (Modood 2018) or Will Kymlicka in Canada (Kymlicka, 2016), have generally denied that there is any substantive difference between multicultural and intercultural policies.

A second critique of multiculturalism was again first articulated in Canada. Conservative critics resented the symbolic downgrading of national majority cultures whose dominance in the public sphere had previously been taken for granted. Others suggested that multicultural policies would lead to a splintering of the country into segregated ‘parallel societies’. Egalitarian and left-wing critics focused on the privileging of ethnocultural and religious differences and regarded multicultural policies of recognition as distracting from social policies of redistribution targeting inequalities of class, race and gender (Barry 2001; Fraser 1995; Okin 1999). Multiculturalism was also blamed for declining solidarity in democratic welfare states (Goodhart 2017; see Calhoun in this issue). All of these charges have resonated strongly in Europe where they have put advocates of multiculturalism on the defensive.

When taking stock after 50 years, it is important to distinguish between three manifestations of multiculturalism: the recognition and celebration of cultural, linguistic, ethnic, religious and racial diversity in civil society; public policies allocating resources and rights to groups identified by these markers; and normative discourses and theories justifying such policies. Without being able to support this with much empirical evidence, my impression is that in the liberal democratic societies of the global north, multiculturalism has been very successful in the first arena, has made slow and always contested progress in the second and has lost most ground in the third. ² Let me briefly explain.

Anybody old enough to remember how pervasive and blatant racism, ethnocentrism and the denigration of minority religions and languages were still in the 1970s and 1980s cannot fail to recognize how thoroughly claims for recognition by oppressed minorities have transformed civil societies. The celebration of diversity in public and social media, in commercial advertising or in the hiring and promotion policies of large companies has made minorities not only visible but has ‘mainstreamed’ to a great extent identities that were previously regarded as deviant or threatening from national majority perspectives. This transformation of civil societies is most evident with regard to physical and mental disabilities and sexual identities and orientations but has also happened with regard to cultural markers of difference. The success of multiculturalism in this respect is not a full victory. Populist movements of the radical right have mobilized against religious, ethnic and racial diversity and have started to turn back the clock where they have won political power. Yet they themselves perceive their battle as a rearguard fight against a cultural transformation that has already taken place.

Trudeau’s official multiculturalism was, however, not just about perceptions, behaviour and discourses in civil society but also a government programme. Will Kymlicka’s and Keith Banting’s Multicultural Policy Index has measured a set of public policies associated with multiculturalism for immigrant groups, indigenous peoples and national minorities in 21 Western democracies in 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010. With very few exceptions, it shows increasing adoption of such policies over time, challenging thus the widespread perception of retreat (Banting and Kymlicka 2013). There is, however, a shift in the content of immigrant integration policies that have been most closely associated with the notion of multiculturalism in Europe. The so-called ‘civic turn’ has replaced previous laissez-faire attitudes by introducing standardized legal integration requirements for naturalization, access to permanent residence and family reunification. Doing so forced legislators indirectly to also define an official minimum content of collective national identities and values that immigrants were expected to embrace (Orgad 2015). The strengthening of civic conceptions of nationhood that are in principle open for including immigrants from diverse origins was, however, combined with a new emphasis on integration into such redefined identities as well as exclusion of those who could not or were unwilling to meet the new requirements of language skills, civic knowledge and support for constitutional values (Joppke 2007; Goodman 2014). The securitization of immigration policies after 9/11 reinforced a political climate in which Muslims were identified as those immigrants least able to meet civic integration requirements. Starting already in 1989 with the French affaire des foulards, illiberal policies targeting specifically Muslims and aiming to curb the presence of visual markers of Islam through symbols such as female headscarves or minarets have recently proliferated in Western democracies (see Tamir in this volume).

If multiculturalism has mostly won in transforming civil societies and has had mixed success in public policies, its most astonishing reversal has occurred with regard to its normative justifications. David Miller (2019) identifies various lines of attack against multicultural ideology. These include liberal egalitarian, anti-essentialist, feminist and social democratic critiques, each of which claims to challenge a core feature of multiculturalism: its inevitable privileging of some cultural groups over others, its misrepresentation of individual identities that do not align with cultural group differences, its attribution of rights to groups that are internally oppressive of women, gays and other minorities, and its prioritizing of a politics of recognition over questions of distributive social justice. According to Miller, a fifth critique is that multicultural ideology demotes national majority identities by denying their special place in the history of those countries ‘where the non-immigrant majority share a common culture, the culture of the group that has been living in the state’s territory for several centuries’ (Miller 2019: 331).

What makes this last line of critique quite different from the others is that it adopts core features of multicultural theory when regarding majorities as distinct cultural groups that deserve public recognition and protection by the state. In contrast to classical theories of multiculturalism, these critics no longer assume that the promotion of national majority cultures by liberal states is an empirical fact that calls for minority rights as a response. Instead, cultural majorities are now regarded as endangered by multicultural ideology.

The new rhetoric of cultural majority rights differs from the unreflective self-assertion of national majorities in the pre-multicultural period when cultural majority dominance was justified – if this was ever called for – in terms of a quasi-natural prerogative of those who had successfully built a nation-state and thus considered themselves as owning it. Contemporary cultural majority rights discourses are instead characterized by the invocation of cultural threats, alienation, victimization and discrimination suffered by national majorities. They thus borrow from multiculturalism not only an epistemology of group essentialism but also normative justifications for state protection. The double source of alleged oppression of majorities are liberal political elites promoting multicultural and cosmopolitan ideologies, and groups of various kinds, be they immigrants importing foreign cultures and values, indigenous and racial minorities whose claims for recognition tarnish the nation’s historical legacies, or critical movements in academia that censure free speech advocating majority identities and values.

This rhetoric turns multiculturalism upside down (by applying justifications for minority rights to cultural majorities) and against itself (by invoking majority rights as a reason for curbing minority rights). Such a volte-face calls not only for a rebuttal but also for critical self-examination by those who have defended multiculturalism as a natural extension of liberal ideas. My rebuttal will argue that the notion of cultural majority rights is empirically implausible and conceptually incoherent. My empirical objection is that, in Western societies, the construction of national majorities has been changing over time and these are today too deeply divided with regard to their cultural identities and attitudes to be considered as distinct groups that could be the bearers of collective rights. Conceptually, from the perspective of democratic theory, it is important to reject the idea that national majority privileges can be established through legitimate majority decisions. In well-functioning liberal democracies, decisions to protect specific aspects of a public culture are not taken on behalf of national majorities but on behalf of all citizens, and majorities supporting such decisions are formed by ever-changing coalitions. My critical self-examination of normative theories of multiculturalism will suggest that these should abandon some of the ‘culturalist’ baggage they have been carrying with them and rely instead more straightforwardly on the liberal and democratic core values of freedom, equality and self-government. These values serve to justify cultural freedom rights for everybody, special cultural rights for minorities, and powers and duties to establish a pluralistic public culture that includes all citizens. I claim that this covers all cultural rights that can be defended on the basis of liberal and democratic principles. There is no space left for special rights of cultural majorities.

Deconstructing cultural majorities

‘Cultural majority rights’ is a composite concept, each component of which requires conceptual clarification. First, the groups in question are characterized by a shared culture and assumed to be united in a desire to defend this culture. This is not a normative, but a conceptual and empirical question. If such cultural majorities exist, their rights can then be defended normatively on democratic grounds, that is, as legitimate majority rule, or on grounds of justice as rights to state protection justified on the basis of alleged special disadvantages or vulnerabilities faced by these cultures.

Let us start by asking: what conception of ‘culture’ and ‘majority’ is implied here? In most uses, the reference is to groups whose members share, and identify with, a common culture, which normally includes the same first language and a set of habits and customs but is sometimes also characterized by a religious tradition or associated with a common ethnic origin and ‘racial’, that is, phenotypical features. Although the term ‘majority’ overtly refers only to a numerical preponderance within a political territory, it is also assumed that these groups have been historically dominant and have spread their culture through the state’s public institutions and policies. Where the political territory is an independent state, the group is a national majority, but the concept may also apply at regional or local levels within states. ³

As this observation already suggests, cultural majorities do not exist naturally but have been created through nation-building efforts by the states that supposedly now have to protect their rights. In Justin Gest’s words, ‘the very idea of a majority is subject to state-driven constructions itself’ (2021: 3706). Theories and comparative historical studies of nationalism pioneered in the 1980s have thoroughly analysed the process of nation-building (Anderson 1983; Breuilly 1982; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Smith 1991). Once it has been completed, the association of states with a particular national culture and majority population tends to be taken for granted and becomes a banal background feature of public life (Billig 1995). This background assumption can become contested again where rapid demographic changes (high immigration and low fertility of native populations) conjure up the spectre of majorities becoming minorities. Yet shifts to a majority-minority society are not simply a matter of demographic facts about immigration, fertility, race, ethnicity or religion, since they depend on how the majority’s boundaries are defined.

Because majorities have been originally constructed through nation-building, their boundaries vary between countries, change over time and can also be radically reconstructed. Even where boundary markers are defined in racial terms emerging from a history of slavery, there is a difference between constructing majorities through a binary ‘not one drop of black blood’ rule, as in the United States, or a multi-graded social hierarchy associated with racial features, as in Brazil. Ethnicity and religion are much more malleable than race. In the 19th century, the national majority whose culture was promoted in the United States was arguably not just white but Anglo-Protestant (Gest 2021: 3711). If we stick to this historic conception of an American majority culture, then the shift to a majority-minority society is no longer a looming scenario for the future but has already happened sometime in the past without much fanfare. Yet in the United States, national majorities have been successively ‘reconstructed’ (ibid.) to include new waves of immigrants, breaking down first religious markers (Catholics and Jews) and now increasingly also ethnic and racial ones (Hispanics and Asians) (Alba 2020). Language is in one aspect the stickiest boundary marker of national majorities since very few countries have changed their dominant national language after independence, but it is also the most inclusive one as immigrants tend to adopt the majority language over two or three generations. Samuel Huntington’s fear that Spanish could become dominant in Florida and the American Southwest and turn it into the United States’ Quebec has not been vindicated (Huntington 2004).

It may be objected that immigrant nations like the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand could modify their collective identity constructions by incorporating newcomers who were initially defined as alien to the nation, whereas European nations are built around the culture of majority homeland populations who are less capable of adapting in such ways and also have stronger moral claims to protect their culture against transformative impacts of immigration (Walzer 2001; Miller 2019; Koopmans and Orgad 2022). Migration historians have challenged the perception that contemporary European nations are really composed of ethnically homogenous populations with historic patterns of settlement inside states’ current borders (Lucassen and Lucassen 2009). There is still a major difference between European settler states in overseas territories that established their own political institutions after conquering and subjugating indigenous peoples, on the one hand, and European nations that emerged from the constant intermingling of groups marked by ethnic, religious and language differences within territorial boundaries that often changed over time and rarely matched pre-existing group identities, on the other hand. Yet settler states and European states have become much more similar in their attitudes to immigration today (Duvergne 2016) and the latter have been thoroughly transformed by contemporary immigration.

Gest’s comparison of six historic majority-minority transformations finds that inclusive reconstruction of national majorities has been possible where the state equally enfranchises the newcomer population and where the government’s subsequent redefinition of the national identity is inclusive (Gest 2021: 3703). This supports expectations that democratic states in Europe have as good a chance as the former settler states in North America or Oceania to manage majority-minority transitions through reconstructing majorities. Once such transitions have happened, however, it becomes implausible to continue defining the reconstructed majorities in terms that describe a past cultural identity. As Alan Patten points out: ‘In today’s multiracial, ethnically plural, religiously diverse societies, there often is no majority ethnic group that has a sharply distinctive experience of socialization apart from the rest of the society’ (Patten, 2020: 543).

My second empirical observation is that the construction of national majority cultures has become hotly contested in all Western liberal democracies. The notion of majorities permanently settled in their homelands and embracing a homogenous set of cultural values has become rather implausible. It needs therefore boundary drawing towards various others whose exclusion is supposed to reassure a majority of its identity (see Triandafyllidou in this issue). Yet also such exclusionary constructions are forcefully rejected by large parts of the very same majorities that these populists claim to represent.

Polarization of attitudes towards immigration, cultural diversity and sexual minorities indicates that national majorities are deeply divided in their views about what they share as a collective identity and which groups ought to be included or excluded from it. Considering national majorities as stable homeland populations who feel threatened by cultural globalization and immigration and need special rights to preserve their identity thus buys too much into strongly contested populist narratives claiming that certain sections of a population represent ‘the people’. There may still be cases where national majorities are less divided than they are today in North America and Europe, but then such majorities will not feel threatened in their identity and require special protection for it. Quite paradoxically, the call for special majority rights seems to be strongest where traditional majorities are so divided among themselves that majority support for majority rights has already eroded.

These new divisions also run through cultural minorities, but they are not as damaging for minority rights claims as they are for majorities. Where historic minorities or majorities fragment into subgroups, some of these may still have claims to minority rights, whereas in the case of a divided majority, the very rationale for its claims qua majority vanishes. That is precisely why majority-minority transitions raise such anxiety. Contemporary defences of cultural majority rights nearly always combine in self-contradictory ways justifications referring to legitimate (historically grounded) majority dominance with claims that historic majority cultures are today dominated by more powerful forces and thus find themselves in a position where justifications for minority rights apply.

The upshot of these observations is that we should not build theories of either majority or minority rights on an essentializing ontology of shared collective identities that are disintegrating before our eyes. While authors like Tariq Modood (2007) and Alan Patten (2011) have offered more nuanced accounts of collective cultural identities that largely escape the charge of essentialism, what matters normatively is not so much how boundaries of group identities are constructed, but whether individuals are disadvantaged and treated unequally because of their perceived belonging to an ascriptive cultural or ethnic group. From this perspective, the case for cultural majority rights is prima facie much weaker than that for minority rights.

Cultural and democratic majorities

As we have seen, there are two distinct strategies for justifying cultural majority rights. One consists in defending legitimate majority domination, which justifies state powers to establish and promote majority cultures, while the other strategy claims that majority cultures have come to be unjustly dominated and thus require special state protection. Both arguments have some merit and can potentially be reconciled with each other but, as I will argue below, only if we drop the notion of cultural majorities as the bearers of both kinds of claims.

This section considers what seems to be the most promising strategy for the first argument. The fact of historic domination of a particular culture in a territory alone can hardly provide normative justification for the power of groups associated with this culture to continue privileging it in the public sphere. Legitimacy for such power might, however, be derived instead from democratic process.

Instead of defending cultural majority rights, where ‘culture’ is the defining attribute of a majority, one could then defend majority cultural rights, in the sense that democratic majorities can claim among other rights also cultural ones. ⁴ The conceptual error in this argumentative move lies, however, in failing to realize that majority rule is a purely procedural aspect of democracy that is premised on principles such as equal and inclusive citizenship, and free, fair and competitive elections (Dahl 1989) that undermine the notion of stable majorities. Democratic majority rule is a decision rule stating that when votes are counted, the preferences of all members of the polity are better represented when the majority prevails over the minority.

Democratic majorities are thus not predefined as social groups; prior to democratic procedures they do not even exist as aggregates of individuals sharing certain political ideas and preferences that can be measured by public opinion surveys. A majority becomes a democratic one only as the contingent outcome of a process of deliberation, voting and decision-making that meets democratic conditions. Among the most important of these is that members of cultural majorities and minorities alike are enfranchized and represented as equal citizens in this process.

The justification of democratic majority rule is thus not that it enables a national or cultural majority to rule over minorities but that it allows taking political decisions in a society characterized by a plurality of divergent interests, identities and ideologies while representing each citizen as an equal member. In a well-functioning democracy with free and competitive elections, there are no permanent majorities that can be characterized in terms of ascriptive features, such as race or ethnicity; the social composition of democratic majorities will include a broad variety of interest and identity groups and these coalitions will frequently intersect and change over time. Privileges for (national) majorities are thus not at all an inherent feature of democracy. ⁵

Where societies have been deeply divided along ethnic, racial or religious lines, democracies may have to adapt by taking these divisions into account through consociational arrangements of power-sharing between distinct groups (Lijphart 1984). Yet consociationalism works best if it does not freeze collective identities and eventually gives way to more open forms of liberal democracy. Moreover, the point of power-sharing is precisely to prevent rather than to justify the domination of cultural majorities.

Legally entrenched cultural privileges are, however, certainly a historic feature of many states emerging from the unhappy marriage between democracy and nationalism. The conflation between national and democratic majorities is therefore not merely a conceptual mistake but has all too often become an institutionalized reality. Where national majorities claim ownership of the state and deny minorities equal citizenship, democracy becomes indeed the rule of ethno-cultural majorities over minorities. The name for this degenerated version of democracy is ethnocracy. ⁶

My point is not that any defence of cultural majority rights must end up as an apology of ethnocracy; it is that such a defence cannot invoke the democratic majority principle because the legitimacy of this principle is premised on the equality of all citizens rather than the rule of a national majority. As I will argue below, democratic majorities do have legitimate powers to shape the content of a state’s public culture, but this culture must be inclusive for all citizens and reflect their cultural differences.

This leaves us with an alternative justification for the rights of cultural majorities that is not grounded in their historic domination, or their demographic weight and voting power, but their contemporary vulnerability.

Are cultural majorities vulnerable?

Do majorities have claims to protection if and when their culture is under threat? As pointed out by liberal theorists of multiculturalism like Will Kymlicka and Alan Patten, it is important to distinguish cultural change from cultural loss. In Kymlicka’s view, what matters is individual autonomy rather than cultural preservation. If a sufficient number of group members want to bring about cultural change, there is no right to preserve a traditional version of that culture against the wishes of its members (Kymlicka 1995: 104). On Alan Patten’s theory of socialization-based cultural membership, “[a]s long as the newcomers continue to be socialized by institutions and practices that are controlled by members of the culture, the culture persists, even if it changes in the process” (Patten 2014: 543; Patten, 2011). Keeping this important distinction in mind, let us consider what kind of vulnerabilities cultural majorities are exposed to and whether these justify a similar set of rights as those granted to cultural minorities. ⁷

A first type of vulnerability refers to demographically dwindling majorities, typically those in high immigration and low fertility societies. Apart from the problem discussed above of defining who the majorities are in such societies, the normative question is: what grounds a claim of cultural groups to preserve a demographic majority? Note that, by definition, minorities could not raise such claims. In their case, demographic vulnerability would refer to an absolute, not a relative decline, and protective rights would kick in at a point where their numbers become so small that they can no longer maintain their languages or cultural practices. So it seems we are considering here a risk of cultural majorities losing a dominant position which they had gained through historical processes of nation-building. If this advantage is to some extent reversed through processes of demographic change, there is no moral claim to stop this from happening. The language of ‘vulnerability’ is thus rather misleading, and the normative argument is question-begging.

The second kind of vulnerability emerges from external threats to the cultural survival of majorities. We can distinguish here the cultural impact of a powerful state on a weaker neighbour from that of global forces that even large nation-states may find difficult to resist. The cultural impact of a large state on its smaller neighbour will be strongest if their dominant national cultures are already close, especially if they share the same language. Germany’s influence on Austrian public culture is huge and much bigger than Italy’s and the same is true for Britain’s influence on Irish culture. Does this make Austrian and Irish cultural majorities particularly vulnerable? Both countries have been quite successful in consolidating recognizably distinct versions of the same language as their national idioms and in exporting their cultural products, especially in literature and the arts, to their larger neighbours. German and English have become pluricentric languages in spite of strong asymmetries of economic and media power between the states where these languages are dominant. The reason is that the institutions of independent states allow also small ones to maintain their distinct public cultures even when faced with powerful neighbours.

A more plausible claim to vulnerability of national majority cultures refers to the rise of a global Anglo-American culture. It is a fact that English has become the global second language, providing huge undeserved advantages to Anglophone countries, for example, in attracting international students and faculty members to their academic institutions and in boosting their global digital and entertainment industries (Van Parijs 2011). While most states have taken a relaxed attitude or have even embraced and promoted English as a second language for their citizens in order to improve their opportunities in a globalized world, France has pioneered public policies in defence of the French language by purging it of English words and has heavily subsidized French arthouse films and other products of its cultural industries.

Countries with small numbers of native speakers of their official languages can hardly resist the steamroller of global English as a second language, but they can still secure the survival of their national languages as first ones in their territory if they are ready to invest in their education systems and cultural institutions. Is this an instance of cultural majority rights or rather of the legitimate power of states to shape their own public culture?

When asking this question, we need to distinguish between concerns about international and global justice, on the one hand, and those about the domestic distribution of cultural rights, on the other hand. Van Parijs (2011) argues that Anglophone countries owe non-Anglophone ones some compensation. Yet the global strength of a language can hardly justify an inverted strength of cultural majority rights in domestic contexts in relation to linguistic minorities, ⁸ or else Anglophone majorities would have lesser claims to cultural majority rights than Francophones and these again much weaker claims than Danes who lack any sizable population of native speakers outside their small state.

We should therefore reject the view that external pressures majority cultures are facing justify downgrading or denying the rights of cultural minorities inside the country. Instead of a cultural majority right, what is at stake in justifying state support for a dominant language is the power of liberal democracies to shape their own public culture, which must be guided as well as constrained by the goal of securing equal citizenship for all.

An alternative approach: cultural freedom, equality and self-government ⁹

Let me sketch an alternative view of cultural rights that takes into account legitimate concerns of democratic states to maintain a shared public culture without attributing special rights to majorities. This approach combines three types of cultural rights that reflect different manifestations of culture as an individual good, a social marker and a public culture and are grounded in and justified by the core values of freedom, equality and self-government as they apply to liberal democratic states. The main results of the analysis are summarized in Table 1.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Three types of cultural rights.

Culture as	Basic values	Type of rights	Rights to	Correlating constraints and duties
Individual good	Freedom	Human rights	Freedom of conscience, speech, association	Non-interference No coercive assimilation Duty of civility
Social marker	Equality	Minority rights	Exemption Protection accommodation Recognition Support Representation	Cultural freedoms Internal minority rights Goal of equal citizenship
Public good	Self-government	Territorial powers	Shaping a public culture	Cultural freedoms Minority rights Inclusiveness of public culture

The first type is cultural rights derived from freedom of conscience, speech and association, which are at the heart of catalogues of universal human rights. People must generally be free to speak their native languages, practice their religion and pursue their cultural customs and traditions in private and public spaces. The corresponding duties of liberal states and other citizens are minimally those of non-interference but more broadly also include a moral ‘duty of civility’ (Rawls 1993: 217). Going beyond Rawls, I suggest that this includes a moral duty to accept a diversity of cultures and treat cultural identities of others with respect (see also Tamir in this issue).

The liberal justification for these cultural rights is straightforward. Culture here is understood as an important element of individuals’ conception of the good. On this view, a liberal state must be neutral between reasonable conceptions of the good and thus must not privilege a particular one over others (Rawls 1993). These cultural liberties apply to individuals and their voluntary associations, not to ascriptive groups. If we consider culture only as a matter of individual conceptions of the good, there is no justification for any special favours handed out by the state to either minorities or majorities, nor for any distinctions based on a group’s rootedness in a territory.

Yet the codification of cultural rights in Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights refers specifically to ‘ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities’ and proclaims that ‘persons belonging to such minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion or to use their own language’. The idea behind this is not that persons belonging to majorities do not enjoy the same rights, but that these rights create a special duty of states to refrain from coercive assimilation of minorities and to protect them against similar threats to their cultural freedom emerging from social pressure exercised by cultural majorities. Cultural minority rights are therefore not merely Hohfeldian ‘privileges’ (Hohfeld 1919), which correspond to the absence of a claim of others that minority members refrain from exercising their culture. Even under the minimalist conception of culture as an individual good, states have special duties to protect the cultural freedom of minorities (HCHR 1994). However, this conception of cultural minority rights is still a rather weak one. As long as we think of such rights as merely securing the pursuit of particular conceptions of the good, the state has no duty to actively support minority groups in the sense of granting them official recognition or providing public resources to assist them in maintaining their cultures.

Rights of a second type are grounded in the value of equal citizenship. From this perspective, cultural differences are no longer just about a plurality of individual conceptions of the good but also mark social, economic and political hierarchies. Cultural rights responding to these social facts go beyond universal human rights and aim to overcome structural disadvantages faced by individuals (because of their belonging to certain groups) that undermine the promise of equal citizenship in liberal democratic states. These rights are thus premised on shared membership in the political community (which in the case of recent immigrants may be an expectation of future citizenship), and they protect groups of citizens against pervasive discrimination or compensate them for entrenched disadvantages.

Cultural minorities suffer such systemic disadvantages where they are excluded from, or not fully included in, nation-building projects. Cultural majority dominance thus provides the test and justification for claims to special cultural minority rights. The mere existence of a formally established religion or an official national language is not per se problematic for cultural freedom, since this does not entail that minorities cannot practice a different religion or use a different language. Moderate forms of religious establishment may not be incompatible with full and equal citizenship for religious minorities (Modood 2007) and assisting immigrants in learning a national majority language will generally help to set them on a path to full citizenship. Yet where a dominant religion is taught in public schools without giving the same right to religious minorities, or where the first languages of minorities are not used for communicating with them in healthcare services, by the police or in courts, the value of citizenship is diminished for minorities.

There are many different types of cultural minorities that can suffer relevant disadvantages, ranging from small and dispersed indigenous and ethnic groups to recently arrived immigrants. Numbers, geographical concentration, cultural links to other states and historical rootedness in the state territory explain differences in the likelihood of minority claims-making and must be taken into account when assessing the justification of such claims. However, there are no categorical differences between types of minorities with regard to these rights. What matters is not where they come from and when they arrived, but how the disadvantages they suffer affect their standing as equal citizens and their opportunities to exercise their rights.

Such minority rights may also be institutionalized in different ways. They include religious exemptions from public laws (e.g. from motorcycle helmet requirements for Sikhs who must wear turbans), protective rights (e.g. making physical violence or verbal abuse targeting racial or religious minorities an aggravated offence), accommodation rights (e.g. translation and interpreter services for recent immigrant groups), public support (e.g. subsidizing minority language teaching), recognition (e.g. declaring a country or region as officially bilingual) and representation rights (e.g. lowering representation thresholds for ethnic minority parties or ensuring descriptive representation of minorities in high public offices). Each of these ways of realizing minority rights has to face its own test of reasonableness and justifiability in terms of equal citizenship and is premised on the fulfillment of citizenship duties by the minority. ¹⁰ Apart from this constraint, which is inherent in the very justification for cultural minority rights, they are also limited by the cultural freedoms of all citizens, including those belonging to national majorities, and by similar rights of minorities within minorities. For example, conservative religious minorities have to respect the rights of sexual minorities within their own communities.

For our concern here, the upshot is that the justification of this second type of cultural rights pertains only to minorities and not to majorities. And when it comes to the limits of these minority rights, ‘the rights of others’ are an important constraint, but cultural majorities do not have any special claim to be collectively regarded as the relevant others.

This does not rule out a scenario where, say, white rural or working-class communities in deindustrialized hinterlands in European or North American democracies might raise claims to some cultural minority rights on grounds that their sedentary lifestyle and lack of economic opportunities diminish the value of their citizenship in a highly urbanized, mobile and affluent society. ¹¹ Yet when raising such claims, they would no longer be arguing from the privileged position of belonging to a cultural majority. They cannot invoke such cultural rights without redefining themselves as belonging to a minority instead of being part of the predominantly urban and culturally diverse majority population. Their claims to have become a new minority would have to be considered on the same grounds as those of immigrant groups whose consolidation as disadvantaged ethnic minorities signals a failure of integration policies to secure their equal citizenship.

While the second type of cultural minority rights are generally Hohfeldian ‘claim rights’ with corresponding positive duties of states and other citizens that go beyond non-interference, the third type can better be understood as self-government powers to shape a public culture. ¹²

The core task of the state is to provide all residents in a territory with public goods that cannot be generated through spontaneous exchange or coordination among individuals. These public goods include, among others, security, an infrastructure for the economy and for individual mobility, public health and education. The last of these items makes it clear that states cannot function well if they have to be strictly neutral between all the various aspects of culture that individuals regard as important elements of their conception of the good.

This is most obvious for language. The first language one learns as a child has great emotional value for individual identity and may even shape, in certain ways, how individuals perceive the world. Yet languages are also instruments for social communication and need to be standardized and spread within a territory to enable all residents of a modern state to communicate with each other. States must therefore promote official languages through their education system and in their political institutions. And states receiving immigrants from many different origins cannot possibly be neutral towards an endless variety of first languages spoken by their populations.

If states thus have to determine which language(s) receive official status and promotion, how should these be selected? Instead of proclaiming a right of national majorities to have their languages established at the expense of linguistic minorities, we should consider this as a democratic power that is constrained by cultural liberties and minority rights. The languages that historically have been spoken by the majority of the native population will naturally be chosen as those to be standardized and spread throughout the territory by public institutions. But this choice cannot be justified on grounds of cultural majority rights, since democratic legislators should also be free to deviate from it. What weight Ireland gives to English and Gaelic as its two official languages in national educational curricula is a matter to be decided by parliamentary majorities. Reviving Gaelic as a public language is neither a duty owed to the small minority of native speakers in the Gaeltacht areas of Western Ireland nor does it violate cultural rights of the majority of monolingual Anglophones. It is simply a democratic power of the Dáil Éireann – the Irish Parliament, which has already adopted a Gaelic name for itself – that it can exercise if there is sufficient political support for such a policy. By contrast, if the Canadian government abolished official bilingualism in its federal institutions, this would violate the minority rights of Francophone Canadians.

In federated and plurinational states, the power to establish an official language is exercised by democratic majorities not only at the federal level, but also within autonomous provinces or regions and is constrained by minority rights in the same way, except that regional governments in linguistic minority regions may be obliged to enable their citizens to also speak the federal majority language and federal governments may have to accept affirmative policies for regional minority languages that compensate for disadvantages. This is roughly the arrangement between the federal institutions and Quebec in Canada. Despite occasional crises triggered by centralizing efforts of federal governments or by secessionists in Quebec, it has been remarkably stable. While minority rights at the federal level as well as within Quebec are essential for this democratic stability, the language of cultural majority rights used by both Anglo and Quebec nationalists is precisely what threatens to upset it.

Language is not the only aspect of a shared public culture in liberal states. Such states also have particular histories, and it is important that government institutions do not remain neutral between rival interpretations of the country’s history. Slavery and racism in the United States, the Holocaust in Germany and Austria, colonialism in many Southern and Western European states and ethnic cleansing in the history of nearly all nation-states must be continuously examined and re-examined. It is not the role of liberal governments to write official histories, but they must promote the critical study and awareness of these histories as a crucial aspect of civic education in their countries. This is quite different from teaching the glorious history of a dominant national majority. As moments of national pride, liberal states will instead emphasize acts of civic courage and solidarity that have united the country across majority-minority divides.

I do not have enough space to enter here the rocky terrain of debates about secularism and the extent to which a liberal public culture can also promote specific religious majority traditions. The main conclusion from the above considerations is that the public culture of a liberal state must be pluralistic and inclusive and thus should not be regarded as promoting only or even primarily the values and traditions of a cultural majority.

Yet how can one justify the difference between the thin and weak cultural rights granted by liberal states to immigrant minorities and the thicker powers enjoyed by indigenous peoples and national minorities? Will Kymlicka famously proposed that the reason is that immigrants have voluntarily waived the right to protect their societal culture of origin by leaving their homelands and cannot expect their host country to let them fully re-establish it there (Kymlicka 1995: 95–100). I think there is a better and more straightforward argument. Immigrant and native minorities do not differ with regard to their cultural freedoms, and their cultural minority rights differ only contextually. There is, however, a categorical difference between current territorial populations and newcomers when it comes to establishing a public culture. Immigrants cannot claim collective powers to do so, or else they would become settlers who attack the native population’s right to self-government (Bauböck 2017). Instead, they enjoy individual claims to citizenship and rights to participate in shaping the public culture of their new home as its citizens, that is, as individuals as well as groups with distinct ethnic, religious or linguistic identities.

Conclusions

This paper started with a summary assessment of the successes and failures of multiculturalism. It claimed that in liberal democracies multiculturalism has been rather successful in transforming civil society by making cultural diversity visible and recognized, and that it has been surprisingly resilient as a set of public policies, although there has been a marked shift towards ‘civic integration’ requirements for the integration of immigrants in the new millennium. Liberal justifications of multicultural minority rights have been much more contested but paradoxically also successful to the extent that they have become hijacked by nativist populists defending cultural rights of national majorities against minority claims.

The paper addresses this latter problem by deconstructing the argument for cultural majority rights as consisting in three propositions, each of which fails on conceptual and empirical grounds. The first proposition is that national majorities share a sufficiently stable cultural identity to be the potential bearers of group rights. Against this, I have argued that historic national majorities in current liberal democracies have been reconstructed to include previously excluded minorities and are today so divided in their cultural attitudes that the notion of cultural majorities becomes increasingly meaningless.

The second proposition is that cultural majorities have rights because in democracies political decisions are taken by or on behalf of majorities. However, unlike cultural majorities, democratic majorities are the contingent outcome of a democratic process of deliberation and decision-making and the legitimacy of majority rule is itself premised on inclusive citizenship. Where democratic majority decisions represent the interests of ethnonational majorities instead of those of all citizens, democracy degenerates into ethnocracy.

The third proposition is that majorities have become vulnerable and suffer unwanted cultural transformation against which special protective rights are warranted. I concluded that even small liberal states generally have sufficient resources to retain the distinct character of a national public culture when faced with powerful and culturally similar neighbours or with the rise of English as a global language. Their use of such resources should, however, not be understood as a cultural majority right but as a political power inherent in liberal democratic statehood.

In the last section, I have sketched an alternative view of cultural rights that avoids the culturalist trap which has enabled the hijacking of multiculturalist arguments by proponents of cultural majority rights. It departs from most liberal theories of multiculturalism by advocating a ‘deculturalization’ of cultural rights. Instead of grounding them in the value of secure belonging to a societal culture (Kymlicka) or of neutrality and equal recognition of cultural groups by the state (Patten), such rights can be derived from the values of individual liberty, equal citizenship and collective self-government. This should make it easier to defend multicultural policies within liberal democracies and it could also help to avoid becoming drawn into unproductive culture wars over identity claims raised on behalf of minorities or majorities.

Table 1 summarizes this argument. It does not provide an easy formula for justifying and limiting minority rights. The three fundamental values can come into conflict with each other. Similarly, the three conceptions of culture as individual good, social marker and public good are not alternative but complementary to each other, which make it sometimes difficult to say what the response of a liberal state to a particular rights claim should be. My argument suggests, however, that invoking cultural majority rights is neither necessary for justifying the powers of democracies to shape the public culture in their territories, nor is it compatible with a liberal conception of public culture whose hallmark is inclusive diversity.