The chapters in this volume start with an important observation: that discussion in liberal democracies about recognizing and defending group rights centers overwhelmingly on the rights of minorities. Widely invoked formulae, like multiculturalism or interculturalism, are meant to address questions in this domain. They are intended to define and protect the rights of immigrants who do not share the culture of the majority in the societies they are entering.

But concentrating on these matters leaves an obvious question unanswered: What about the right of majorities, for instance, to defend their language and culture? And if there are such rights, how should one balance them against the rights of minorities when the two seem to clash? The laudable aim of this book is to cast light on these important and timely issues.

There are clear cases where the culture of a historic majority is endangered by migration. Small populations, such as the Polynesian Fijians, or the Kanaks of New Caledonia, are obviously endangered by a large influx of people of another culture, as the editors mention in Chapter 1. And then there is the vulnerability of certain languages, where a small population base, coupled with the power of a regional lingua franca, can pose a real challenge. This is the situation faced by Quebecois in the anglophone ocean of North America, where the threat comes from a language that is already a global lingua franca. It is not that French is in danger of extinction globally, but locally its survival is not assured. Or, we can cite the case of Latvian, the native medium of a small country descended upon by a substantial population of Russophones, dominant in the entire region, during the period of Soviet control. These predicaments are also discussed in this volume.

These are special situations, but they raise important issues of principle, which have wide application, concerning the historic role of migration in constituting the population of a given society. A long-standing cultural majority that is later overwhelmed by mass migration describes the plight of aboriginals in a host of contemporary states. Just about all western hemisphere countries, plus Australia, fit into this category, as arguably does Russia (in Siberia) and perhaps also India (taking Adivasis into account). Here, there are strong grounds for according minorities a special status, and in many cases the right to substantial reparations.

But the situations that are most often discussed and hotly debated in our contemporary world concern advanced democracies, which, for one reason or another, are admitting large numbers of people from outside, either as refugees or as regular immigrants and participants in the labor force. Once again, this class includes many Western hemisphere states, and since the Second World War, western European states. But countries on other continents, like India and South Africa, also fit this pattern. Resolving majority–minority tensions in these societies is a really challenging task.

One source of difficulty comes from the elusive nature of the majority culture, which may defy resolution in a non-question-begging way. A line from Chapter 1 offers an interesting illustration: “Calls have been made for France to abandon the principle of laïcité to accommodate the reality of multiculturalism.” Even this way of describing the issue is not neutral. It has a strong ring of the defenders of a hard laïcité in France (and also in Quebec), who have diabolized the term multiculturalisme in a way that defenders of this principle in (anglophone) Canada find unrecognizable. The big unresolved issue in this debate, on both sides of the Atlantic, is: What exactly is laïcité (roughly translated as “secularism,” or “the separation of church and state”)? One can identify three different kinds, or purposes, of secularism in modern Western history: in one form (a) it exists to defend religion against the state. This is the separation defined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which declares that Congress shall adopt no law establishing religion or impeding the “free exercise thereof.” Opposed to this, we have (b) laïcité that defends the state from religion. We can understand why this played a role in 1904–5 in France, where a powerful movement of monarchist Catholics wanted to abolish the Republic. Then between these two, we have (c) a secularism that takes neither side, but calls for neutral public institutions and defends the freedom to practice whatever religion, or non-religion, or anti-religion subscribed to by citizens.

People often identify secularism (b) with France; but in fact, what happened in 1904–5 is more complicated, and the laws were passed by people who supported both (b) and (c). We can see how many questions are begged in the sentence I quoted above opposing “French” laïcité and “multiculturalism.” In fact, the issue as I see it, on both sides of the Atlantic pits (b) against (c). Still, I am not a neutral observer, but rather a strong partisan of (c).¹

This is just one example of why the task of weighing majority and minority rights can be complex and difficult and that means that we are all the more indebted to the well-informed and clear-sighted authors of this volume for undertaking it.

Charles Taylor