Previous research has shown that the public tends to see some groups as less deserving of social rights. Our focus in this article is whether they are also seen as less entitled to engage in political claims-making. Recent theorists of inclusive nationalism argue that whether minorities are seen as having the right to codetermine the future may depend on whether the majority believes minorities are morally committed to the nation. Drawing on a unique survey experiment, we test this intuition by analyzing how majority perceptions of a minority's commitment to the larger society influence support for claims-making by immigrants and national minorities. We show that immigrants, French-speaking Quebeckers, and Indigenous peoples are judged more harshly about their right to make claims and that this is in part explained by the majority's views that these groups are not, in fact, committed members of the larger political community.

It is increasingly acknowledged that animals have an intrinsic moral status, in part due to the influential work of many moral philosophers. However, surprisingly little has been written by philosophers on whether animals are owed social membership and the rights that attach to membership in society. In this paper, I explore why the idea of social membership matters, particularly in relation to domesticated animals, and how it can guide legal and political reforms. Focusing on social membership identifies neglected avenues for transformative change, and offers new ways of challenging the deeply-embedded ‘human use typologies' that currently govern our relations to domesticated animals. It also raises fascinating philosophical questions about the definition of ‘society' and the role of an ethics of membership. Ultimately, we will need to develop a new philosophy of interspecies society.

Early defenders of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights invoked species hierarchy: human beings are owed rights because of our discontinuity with and superiority to animals. Subsequent defenders avoided species supremacism, appealing instead to conditions of embodied subjectivity and corporeal vulnerability we share with animals. In the past decade, however, supremacism has returned in work of the new ‘dignitarians’ who argue that human rights are grounded in dignity, and that human dignity requires according humans a higher status than animals. Against the dignitarians, I argue that defending human rights on the backs of animals is philosophically suspect and politically self-defeating.

It is a commonplace amongst communitarians, socialists and feminists alike that liberalism is to be rejected for its excessive ‘individualism’ or ‘atomism,’ for ignoring the manifest ways in which we are ‘embedded’ or ‘situated’ in various social roles and communal relationships. The effect of these theoretical flaws is that liberalism, in a misguided attempt to protect and promote the dignity and autonomy of the individual, has undermined the associations and communities which alone can nurture human flourishing.

My plan is to examine the resources available to liberalism to meet these objections. My primary concern is with what liberals can say in response, not with what particular liberals actually have said in the past. Still, as a way of acknowledging intellectual debts, if nothing else, I hope to show how my arguments are related to the political morality of modem liberals from J.S. Mill through to Rawls and Dworkin. The term ‘liberal’ has been applied to many different theories in many different fields, but I’m using it in this fairly restricted sense. First, I’m dealing with a political morality, a set of moral arguments about the justification of political action and political institutions. Second, my concern is with this modem liberalism, not seventeenth-century liberalism, and I want to leave entirely open what the relationship is between the two. It might be that the developments initiated by the ‘new liberals’ are really an abandonment of what was definitive of classical liberalism. G.A. Cohen, for example, says that since they rejected the principle of ‘self-ownership’ which was definitive of classical liberalism (e.g. in Locke), these new liberals should instead be called ‘social democrats.’My concern is to defend their political morality, whatever the proper label.

Do increasing, and increasingly diverse, immigration flows lead to declining support for redistributive policy? This concern is pervasive in the literatures on immigration, multiculturalism and redistribution, and in public debate as well. The literature is nevertheless unable to disentangle the degree to which welfare chauvinism is related to (a) immigrant status or (b) ethnic difference. This paper reports on results from a web-based experiment designed to shed light on this issue. Representative samples from the United States, Quebec, and the “Rest-of-Canada” responded to a vignette in which a hypothetical social assistance recipient was presented as some combination of immigrant or not, and Caucasian or not. Results from the randomized manipulation suggest that while ethnic difference matters to welfare attitudes, in these countries it is immigrant status that matters most. These findings are discussed in light of the politics of diversity and recognition, and the capacity of national policies to address inequalities.

Western democracies have developed a number of effective models for accommodating ethnocultural diversity. One of these involves the use of federal or quasi-federal forms of territorial autonomy to enable self-government for national minorities and indigenous peoples. These forms of territorial autonomy are in general a success. The merits of these models have been underestimated because many people measure success by an inappropriate criterion: namely, the absence of secessionist mobilization. This cannot be the correct standard for evaluating democratic multination states. The success of a common Western approach to territorial autonomy is related, in a complex way, to a particular view about the legitimacy and perhaps even inevitability of secessionist mobilization.

Most liberal democracies exhibit cultural pluralism, that is, citizens of the same country belong to various cultural communities, and so speak different languages, read different literatures, practice different customs. Most contemporary liberal political philosophy, on the other hand, assumes that countries are “nation-states”. Citizens of the same state are assumed to share a common nationality, speak the same language, develop the same culture. My concern in this paper is with how liberals have adapted their principles to deal with cultural pluralism.

Is international migration a threat to the redistributive programmes of destination countries? Existing work is divided. This paper examines the manner and extent to which increases in immigration are related to welfare state retrenchment, drawing on data from 1970 to 2007. The paper makes three contributions: (1) it explores the impact of changes in immigration on social welfare policy over both the short and medium term; (2) it examines the possibility that immigration matters for spending not just directly, but indirectly, through changes in demographics and/or the labour force; and (3) by disaggregating data on social expenditure into subdomains (including unemployment, pensions, and the like), it tests the impact of immigration on different elements of the welfare state. Results suggest that increased immigration is indeed associated with smaller increases in spending. The major pathway is through impact on female labour force participation. The policy domains most affected are ones subject to moral hazard, or at least to rhetoric about moral hazard.

Many commentators—including some animal rights theorists—have argued that non-human animals cannot be seen as members of the demos because they lack the critical capacities for self-rule and moral agency which are required for citizenship. We argue that this worry is based on mistaken ideas about both citizenship, on the one hand, and animals, on the other. Citizenship requires self-restraint and responsiveness to shared norms, but these capacities should not be understood in an unduly intellectualized or idealized way. Recent studies of moral behaviour show that civil relations between citizens are largely grounded, not in rational reflection and assent to moral propositions but in intuitive, unreflective and habituated behaviours which are themselves rooted in a range of pro-social emotions (empathy, love) and dispositions (co-operation, altruism, reciprocity, conflict resolution). Fifty years of ethological research have demonstrated that many social animals—particularly domesticated animals—share the sorts of dispositions and capacities underlying everyday civility. Once we broaden our conception of citizenship to include a richer account of the bases of civic relations, it becomes clear that domesticated animals and humans can be co-creators of a shared moral and political world. We have nothing to fear, and much to gain, by welcoming their membership in the demos.

This article is one of a series commissioned by Government and Opposition exploring identity politics in several national and international contexts. Most discussions of ‘the Canadian identity’ focus on how ‘being Canadian’ relates to various sub-state group identities, such as Québécois, Aboriginal or immigrant identities. There is often said to be a distinctly Canadian model of reconciling national identity with sub-group identities. I argue that the Canadian model of accommodating identities is not unique, but rather reflects broader trends throughout the West. I also suggest that an equally important but neglected part of ‘being Canadian’ is the external dimension i.e., how Canadians relate to the wides world.

Focusing on the nature of modern nationalism, Kymlicka asserts that Franck overstates the dichotomy of so-called romantic tribal nationalism and traditional nationalism as seen in the United States and France, which Franck claims is liberal, inclusive, and based on political principles rather than blood lines. Using examples from France, the United States, and Quebec, Kymlicka shows that language and common identity as well as liberal principles of freedom and democracy compose modern liberal nationalism. More sympathetic to minority nationalism than Franck, Kymlicka argues that minority movements are not irrational but often based upon legitimate claims, claims that majorities frequently fail to take seriously. Kymlicka concludes in agreement with Franck that minority nationalists should have greater representation at the international level, not simply as a means of pacifying minority nationalists but in the interests of international justice.

Popular opposition to immigration is rooted in many factors. In this essay, we focus on one specific issue that has become prominent in recent debates—namely, the fear that the welfare state is being undermined by the impact of increasing ethnic and racial diversity. There are actually two concerns here: first, that ethnic and racial diversity as such makes it more difficult to sustain redistributive social policies because it is difficult to generate feelings of national solidarity and trust across ethnic and racial lines, and second, that the “multiculturalism” policies adopted to recognize or accommodate immigrant groups tend to further undermine national solidarity and trust. If either of these hypotheses were true, the very idea of a “multicultural welfare state,” a welfare state that respects and accommodates diversity, would be almost a contradiction in terms. We review the existing evidence and suggest that both hypotheses are overstated. The evidence to date suggests that there is no inherent tendency for either immigrant ethnic diversity or multiculturalism policies to erode the welfare state. We conclude with some speculation about the implications of this evidence for debates about the rights of noncitizens.