Hostname: page-component-76d6cb85b7-kcxw8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-07-23T12:50:53.872Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Ambivalent Potential of Cultural Identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Katherine Fierlbeck
Katherine Fierlbeck
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Despite the overwhelming prevalence of democratic ideals in contemporary political relations throughout the world, a potent ideological challenge to liberal democratic norms is the recent claim that “differential” rights are essential to foster and protect the identity of individual rights within culturally distinct groups. This article examines the claim that cultural identity confers sufficient normative force upon which to base distinct political rights for specific groups. In what, precisely, does the normative force of “cultural identity” lie? The article challenges the claims that individuals' sense of personal identity can only arise through a “secure cultural context”; that a passive sense of group identity is a “primary good” that equals or even precedes the importance of universal human rights; and that this “politics of inclusion” based upon differential rights for different groups will lead to greater equality and tolerance within the larger political community.

Résumé

On se doit de constater la très grande prépondérance des idéaux démocratiques dans les relations politiques contemporaines dans le monde. Toutefois, la thèse selon laquelle les droits à géométrie variable sont essentiels pour protéger et promouvoir l'identité des droits individuels à l'intérieur de groupes culturellement distincts, s'est imposée comme un puissant défi idéologique lancé aux normes démocratiques et libérates. Cet article cherche à vérifier si l'identité culturelle confère suffisament de force normative pour légitimer l'attribution de droits politiques distincts à des groupes spécifiques. En quoi au juste consiste la force normative de l'identité culturelle? L'argumentation remet en question les idées suivantes: l'émergence d'un sens de l'identité personnelle chez les individus n'est possible qu'à travers un « contexte culturel protégé »; un sens passif de l'identité de groupe est tout aussi sinon plus importante que les droits humains universels; la « politique d'inclusion » basée sur des droits à géométrie variable pour des groupes différents mènera à plus de tolérance et d'égalité au sein de la communauté politique élargie.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , March 1996 , pp. 3 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

* For their helpful criticism, the author thanks John MacKinnon, David Bray-brooke, Louise Carbert, Gil Winham and Denis Stairs.

1 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. by Macpherson, C. B. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968 [1651]), 227.Google Scholar

2 See Taylor, Charles, The Malaise of Modernity (Concord, Ont.: Anansi, 1992)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 5.

3 “The individual recognizes this essence as not only his universal outward existence, but also as that which is particularized in his own identity and in that of fellow-citizens. Hence each one has in this spirit nothing else but assurance of himself, and finds in existing reality nothing but himself. In them I see the free unity of self with others, which exists through others as it does through me. I see them as myself and myself as them in this free unity or universal substance…” (Hegel, G. W. F., “The Philosophy of Right and Law,” in Friedrich, C. J., ed., The Philosophy of Hegel [New York: Modern Library, 1953], 270).Google Scholar

Herder articulated the human desire for authenticity in his observation that “each human being has his own measure, as it were an accord peculiar to him of all his feelings to each other.” Cited in Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 375.Google Scholar

4 Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).Google Scholar

5 While this issue is most prevalent in current literature within the liberalism-communitarianism debates, it has arisen in many different controversies. Robert Nozick, for example, has taken John Rawls and Bernard Williams to task for their “self-esteem” defences for some modicum of equality by arguing that “when everyone, or almost everyone, has some thing or attribute, it does not function as a basis for self-esteem. Self-esteem is based on differentiating characteristics; that's why it's, self-esteem” (Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State, and Utopia [New York: Basic Books, 1974], 243Google Scholar, emphasis in original).

6 Young, I. M., “Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship,” Ethics 99 (1989), 251.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Young, I. M., Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 97.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., 101.

9 “To imagine a person incapable of constitutive attachments such as these is not to conceive an ideally free and rational agent, but to imagine a person wholly without character, without moral depth” (Sandel, Michael, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982], 179).Google Scholar

10 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 116.

11 Ibid., 124.

12 Ibid., 164.

13 Minow, Martha, Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 382.Google Scholar

14 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 166, 167.

15 Ibid., 184.

16 Ibid., 163.

17 Taylor, Charles, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Gutman, Amy, ed., Multiculturalism and the “Politics of Recognition” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 68.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 66.

19 Kymlicka, Will, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 165.Google Scholar

20 Kymlicka, Will, “Individual and Community Rights,” in Baker, Judith, ed., Group Rights (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 25.Google Scholar

21 Ibid.

22 Kymlicka, Will, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).Google Scholar

23 Ibid., 76.

24 Kymlicka, “Individual and Community Rights,” 24–25.

25 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), 140.Google Scholar

26 Ibid., esp. chaps. 6 and 8.

27 See, for example, Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992).Google Scholar

28 Kymlicka, “Individual and Community Rights,” 25.

29 Denise G. Réaume, “The Group Right to Linguistic Security,” in Baker, ed., Group Rights, 128. This claim by itself, however, inevitably raises the question regarding whose linguistic rights ought to be defended. Unless it is combined with separate and distinct arguments based upon “historical obligation,” the principle of equal worth for all cultures would seem to require that all linguistic groups’ languages ought actively to be fostered and protected.

30 Boldt, Menno, Surviving as Indians: The Challenge of Self-Government (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 137.Google Scholar

31 See, for instance, Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, 172, 197; Kymlicka, “Individual and Community Rights,” 25; and Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, chap 5.

32 Another difficulty is empirical: if individuals are patently unable to make meaningful decisions outside a rich cultural context, how do we account for those people who not only survive but also thrive in cultural contexts not their own? Must we invoke a conception of “false consciousness” here? The explanation for why some people are able to succeed without a rich cultural heritage to which they can refer with pride must depend upon the accounts offered to us by psychologists and sociologists. But it does raise some doubts about the “universal” need for individuals to refer proudly to a clearly defined cultural heritage.

33 See, for example, Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

34 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 186.

36 Kymlicka, Liberalism, 176, 192.

37 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 151.

38 Boldt, Surviving as Indians, xx.

39 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, 89.

40 Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, 29. See also chap. 5 in Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41 Macpherson, Possessive Individualism.

42 “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it…. The total result looked for by colonial domination was indeed to convince the natives that colonialism came to lighten their darkness. The effect consciously sought by colonialism was to drive into natives’ heads the idea that if the settlers were to leave, they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation, and bestiality” (Fanon, Franz, The Wretched of the Earth [New York: Grove Press, 1963], 210–11).Google Scholar

43 The consequences of inflating the political currency of human rights have been cogently articulated by Pocklington, T. C. in “Against Inflating Human Rights,” The Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice 2 (1982), 77–86.Google Scholar

44 Tully, James, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, 124.