1 The information in the following paragraphs is largely drawn from Castles, Stephen, The Challenge of Multiculturalism: Global Changes and the Australian Experience (Wollongong, NSW: Centre for Multicultural Studies, University of Wollongong for the Office of Multicultural Affairs, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 1992), ch. 1Google Scholar, and Ozolins, Uldis, ‘Immigration and Immigrants,’ in Brett, Judith, Gillespie, James, and Goot, Murray, eds., Developments in Australian Politics (Melbourne: Macmillan 1994)Google Scholar.

2 According to Castles, the first Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, “promised the Australian public that there would be ten British immigrants for every ‘foreigner',” The Challenge of Multiculturalism, 8.

3 There is disagreement about the extent to which the policy is accepted by the population at large (opinion polls give different results depending on the questions asked), and attempts are often made to challenge the consensus in the name of ‘ordinary Australians.’ The most intellectually respectable of these was the historian Blainey's, GeoffreyAll for Australia (North Ryde, NSW: Methuen Haynes 1984)Google Scholar. Recently, strong opposition to multiculturalism has been voiced by elements within the conservative government and by some independent members of parliament. While the government is maintaining an official- though somewhat muted - commitment to multiculturalism, it is taking the opportunity to cut back on multicultural programmes.

4 See Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, in Utilitarianism; Liberty; Representative Government (London: Everyman Library 1957)Google Scholar, especially chs. 2, 3. For some discussion of Mill in this context, see Ten, C.L., ‘Multiculturalism and the Value of Diversity,’ in Kukathas, Chandran, ed., Multicultural Citizens: The Philosophy and Politics of Identity (St. Leonards, NSW: The Centre for Independent Studies 1993)Google Scholar.

5 See Rawls, John, ‘The Idea of an Overlapping Consensus,’ Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 7 (1987), 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; seep. 6. The distinction between ‘toleration’ liberalism and ‘autonomy’ liberalism is criticized in Kymlicka, Will, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995), ch. 8Google Scholar. The passage from Rawls is cited and discussed on 163-4.

6 See Taylor, Charles, ‘Self-interpreting Animals,’ Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 See Kymlicka, Will, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1989), ch. 8Google Scholar. Kymlicka, reiterates this position in Multicultural Citizenship, ch. 5, 80–94Google Scholar, but in the exposition moves towards the position - discussed below - that culture is important for our sense of identity.

8 As mentioned above (note 5), Kymlicka argues elsewhere against ‘toleration liberalism’ that autonomy should be the fundamental value for liberals; so that for him, liberal toleration should not be extended to those cultural minorities which restrict the civil liberties of their members. See Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, ch. 8. While I am sympathetic to this argument, there are some difficulties in applying it. It may be that a cultural group (e.g., a religion) does not restrict the civil liberties of its members; but because it controls certain resources which are of profound importance to their members (i.e., the promise of salvation), it is able to restrict their liberty in important ways. A culture may not only determine the importance of individual liberty, but may also determine what counts as a constraint on it (e.g., the threat of damnation hardly affects a non-believer).

9 For persuasive accounts of the importance of culture to identity, see Margalit, Avishai and Raz, Joseph, ‘National Self-Determination,’ Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990) 439-61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Margalit, Avishai and Halbertal, Moshe, ‘Liberalism and the Right to Culture,’ Social Research 61 (1994) 491–510Google Scholar. Margalit and Halbertal draw a distinction between the ‘metaphysical individual’ - identified by them with the ‘person’ - and the ‘anthropological individual’ - the ‘personality.’ In their terminology, when I lose a certain cultural identity I cease to be the same ‘personality’ though I remain the same ‘person.’ In ‘On Being a Person,’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (1996) 38-46, I argue against the reification of the concept of a person, and suggest that the concept should not be understood as designating a metaphysical substratum (what we essentially are beneath various social identities), but rather as one of the social identities which are available to us.

10 See Kukathas, Chandran, ‘Are There Any Cultural Rights?’ Political Theory 20 (1992) 105-39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; reprinted in part in Kymlicka, Will, ed., The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995)Google Scholar. Page references here will be to the latter.

11 Kukathas, , ‘Are There Any Cultural Rights?', 238Google Scholar

12 Kukathas, ‘Are There Any Cultural Rights?', 234-7. Kukathas’ arguments here are overstated. That it is difficult to put in place government policies which foster a healthy and independent cultural life does not mean that it is impossible. For example, one such policy might be to secure the right of internal disagreement and criticism. If the right to leave is the only right of protest that members of a community have, then internal criticism and reform will be stifled.

13 As Will Kymlicka notes, the analogy between religion and culture does not work: “It is quite possible for a state not to have an established church. But the state cannot help but give at least partial establishment to a culture when it decides which language is to be used in public schooling, or in the provision of state services” (Multicultural Citizenship, 111).

14 See Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell1983), ch. 3. Needless to say, the scope of this argument is limited to modern states. In premodern societies it was perfectly possible to have multicultural states in which the culture of the ruling classes was quite different from those over whom they rule. Indeed, this was probably the norm. See Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, ch. 2.

15 See Mill, John Stuart, Representative Government, in Utilitarianism; Liberty; Representative Government, ch. 16, 361Google Scholar: “Free institutions are next to impossible on a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative democracy, cannot exist…. The same books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, do not reach them.“

16 This point is made by Miller, David; see On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995), ch. 3, esp. 70–73Google Scholar.

17 For example, Raz, Joseph writes: “A political society, a state, consists - if it is multicultural - of diverse communities, and belongs to none of them.” See ‘Multiculturalism: A Liberal Perspective,’ Dissent (Winter, 1994), 67–79, 69Google Scholar. Jürgen Habermas argues that the liberal-democratic state - the proper object of’ constitutional patriotism'- should be differentiated both in theory and practice from the cultural community - the object of nationalist sentiments; see ‘Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the Future of Europe,’ Praxis International 12 (1992) 1-19. Chandran Kukathas does discuss the issue of Australian national identity, and - not surprisingly - argues for a ‘weak’ understanding of this notion - comprising a ‘shared history and common legal and political institutions.’ See Kukathas, ‘The Idea of an Australian Identity,’ in Kukathas, ed., Multicultural Citizens. But even this ‘weak’ understanding (which ignores language) is incompatible with the demand of liberal neutrality.

18 To avoid misunderstanding, let me repeat (see note 14) that this claim only applies to modem states, where the nature of state power and the scope of its interventions in the lives of its subjects are enormously different from that, say, of the vast multi-ethnic empires of the premodern world. No doubt most of these were at least as ‘multicultural’ as any modern state; as argued, for example, in McNeill, William H., Polyethnicity and National Unity in World History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But the issue of multiculturalism takes on a different meaning in the modern world where the idea of a common culture plays a key role in the legitimation of the state.

19 Kymlicka, , Multicultural Citizenship, 11Google Scholar

20 It was one of the great imperial achievements of the English to create a concept of ‘Britishness’ which encompassed, and to a certain extent even fostered, subordinate Scottish and Welsh identities. On the eighteenth century, see Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press 1992)Google Scholar, and on the nineteenth century, see the essays in Hobsbawm, E.J. and Ranger, Terence, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983)Google Scholar.

21 It may be that this is a matter of definition, with Kymlicka requiring a high degree of cultural and linguistic homogeneity within a community before it is to be counted as a nation. But if this definition is accepted, it is not clear whether there will be any nations. Certainly the Anglophone majority and the indigenous minority in Canada will not count as such. I see little advantage in employing a definition of ‘nation’ which would exclude the United States, France, Britain, and perhaps even England. Kymlicka argues that we “should distinguish ‘patriotism,’ the feeling of obligation to the state, from national identity, the sense of membership in a national group” (Multicultural Citizenship, 13).While this distinction is important in some contexts (the patriotism of the ancient world was not national identity), it is dubious whether it has much application in the modern world where mass allegiance is carried by a sense of belonging to the same culture (even when, as with Great Britain, Canada, or the United States, this culture contains diversity).

22 For Macintyre's, account of tradition, see After Virtue, 2d ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1984)Google Scholar, ch. 15, and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth 1988), ch. 18. It should be noted that Macintyre himself would not count a national culture as anything more than a debased tradition; see ‘Is Patriotism a Virtue?’ The Lindley Lectures, The University of Kansas, 1984.

23 See Kymlicka, , Multicultural Citizenship, 98-9Google Scholar.

24 The point here is not that the culture of immigrants is in some sense inferior as a culture to that of their host country. The inequality is political and contextual: their language is not the language of public debate, their history is not taught in schools, and so on. Their culture does not enjoy the same public status, but will become a matter of private choice and commitment. This contextual inequality would be reversed if migration took place in the other direction.

25 Liberal arguments for a radical easing of restrictions on entry are presented by Carens, Joseph H., ‘Aliens and Citizens: The Case for Open Borders,’ Review of Politics 49 (1987) 251-73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; slightly abridged version reprinted in Kymlicka, Will, ed., The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995)Google Scholar.

26 The most impressive recent accounts of these developments are Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism, and Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2d ed. (London: Verso 1991)Google Scholar. For appropriation and criticism, see Poole, Ross, ‘Nationalism and the Nation State in Late Modernity,’ European Studies Journal 10 (1993) 161-74Google Scholar, and ‘Nationalism: The Last Rites?’ in Pavkovic, Aleksandar, Czarnota, Adam, and Koscharsky, Halyna, eds., Nationalism and Postcommunism (Dartmouth: Aldershot 1995)Google Scholar.

27 It is puzzling that Margalit and Raz's sensitive discussion of cultural identity in ‘National Self-Determination’ makes no reference to this. But the relationship of national identity to territory is a crucial component in the claim to self determination.

28 In recent years, Australia has been admitting between 80,000 and 100,000 immigrants per year, using a mix of economic and social, family reunion, and humanitarian criteria as the basis of admission. The current government has just lessened the overall intake to around 70,000, and changed the criteria so that economic and social criteria (e.g., education, skill, language, financial considerations) take priority over family reunion and need. This has the effect of giving preference to those who are already doing reasonably well. It also decreases the need for the government to involve itself in programmes aimed at settling new immigrants into the Australian community.

29 The Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia, ed. David Horton (Aboriginal Studies Press for Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Studies 1994), gives the figure of 314,500 for the Aboriginal population in 1788 (Appendix, 1299). However, in Aboriginal Sovereignty: Reflections on Race, State and Nation (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin 1966), Henry Reynolds remarks that an 1838 estimate of 1,400,000 Aborigines ‘may have been too high, but … was probably closer to present day assessments than the figure of 300,000 accepted from 1930 until recently’ (20). This would put the figure as closer to 900,000.

30 New evidence has recently been presented which dates a rock carving discovered at Jinmium in the Northern Territory as 75,000 years old, and other human traces as between 120,000 and 176,000 years old. See Fullager, Richard, Head, Lesley and Price, David, ‘Early Human Occupation of Northern Australia: Archaeology and Thermoluminescence Dating of Jinmium Rock Shelter, Northern Territory,’ Antiquity 70 (1996), 751-73CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Even if this dating is accepted, however, it does not establish continuity with contemporary Aboriginals. There have been invasions and other large population movements since then.

31 Figures from Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia, 1299.1t should be noted that in recent years there has been a marked increase in the number of those who identify themselves as Aboriginal, and this is reflected in census returns.

32 For example: median income of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders was twothirds of the national figure; mortality rates are over two and a half times the national average; life expectancy is 15 to 17 years less than that of the whole population; infant and perinatal mortality rates are three times the national average; rate of imprisonment is eighteen times that of non-Aboriginals; unemployment rates are 35% against the overall rate of 9%, etc. Figures are from the 1991 census, and are contained in Castles, Ian, ed., Year Book Australia 1994 No. 76 (Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics 1994), 411-16.Google Scholar

33 On these points, see Rowse, Tun, ‘Aborigines: Citizens and Colonial Subjects,’ in Brett, Judith, Gillespie, James, and Goot, Murray, eds., Developments in Australian Politics (Melbourne: Macmillan 1994)Google Scholar, especially 184. The claim that five-sixths of Aboriginals would not qualify for native title was made by Mansell, Michael; see ‘The Court Gives An Inch But Takes Another Mile: The Aboriginal Provisional Government Assessment of the Mabo Case,’ Aboriginal Law Bulletin 2:57 (August 1992), 4–7Google Scholar. Since the body of this paper was written, the High Court has determined (the ‘Wik Judgement’ of December 1996) that native title has not been extinguished for large areas of rural land. For these ‘pastoral leases,’ Aboriginal rights coexist with the rights of farmers to use the land for agricultural purposes. The legal, economic and political implications of this decision have yet to be worked out, but the government is under considerable pressure to legislate to extinguish this residual native title.

34 The argument that it is not coherent to separate the issue of sovereignty from that of property in this way and that the Australian courts should recognize pre-existing Aboriginal sovereignty is powerfully made in Henry Reynolds, Aboriginal Sovereignty.

35 These point are well made in Thompson, Janna, ‘Land Rights and Aboriginal Sovereignty,’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 68 (1990) 313-29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 See, for example, Keefe, Kevin, From the Centre to the City: Aboriginal Education, Culture and Power (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press 1992), 192Google Scholar; Rowse, , ‘Aborigines: Citizens and Colonial Subjects,’ 186Google Scholar.

37 Kymlicka, , Multicultural Citizenship, 219-20Google Scholar. In a section omitted from the cited passage, Kymlicka argues that claims for compensation do not by themselves justify the self-government rights which are his preferred option for dealing with the claims of indigenous people. He writes: “Many groups have been wrongfully dispossessed of property and other economic opportunities, including women, blacks, and Japanese immigrants …. Each of these groups may be entitled to certain forms of compensatory justice, but this does not by itself explain or justify granting powers of self-government….” At the very least, this argument confuses questions of property with those of sovereignty. I will say something about the self-government option later in this paper. After the passage quoted, Kymlicka argue that indigenous people may themselves have acquired land by expropriation of prior claimants. Whatever the force of this argument in some cases, it has no application to the Australian case.

38 Kymlicka, , Multicultural Citizenship, 11-26, 61–69, etc.Google Scholar

39 A different but analogous case is that of African Americans whose past is one of forced immigration and slavery. It may be that behind Kymlicka's decision to marginalize the issue of historical wrong is the fear that the very enormity of the crime and its consequences may serve to inhibit moral reflection and action. This is a real worry, especially when the results of relatively abstract argument are pitted against the comfortable certainties of everyday morality reflection and the political problems in the way of practical policy. But the problem is inescapable. The other side of this problem is ressentiment: the way in which the identity of an oppressed group is constituted by the image of an oppression so vast that it can never be expiated or diminished. See Brown, Wendy, States of Injury (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1995), esp. ch. 3Google Scholar. But this problem is one for members of the oppressed group to resolve, not for advice from those implicated in the oppression.

40 See, for example, Paul Coe, ‘The Struggle for Aboriginal Sovereignty,’ Kevin Gilbert,’ Aboriginal Sovereign Position: Summary and Definition,’ and Mansell, Michael, ‘Towards Aboriginal Sovereignty: Aboriginal Provisional Government,’ in Social Alternatives 13:1 (April 1994) 10-12, 13-15, 16–18Google Scholar. For a moderate version of the case for sovereignty, see Henry Reynolds, Aboriginal Sovereignty.

41 See Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, passim but especially chs. 2 and 4. Apart from the problems discussed in the next two paragraphs, it is worth noting that Kymlicka's account limits the options which are available to indigenous people. It may be the case that many do desire national independence. But many do not, and a theory of indigenous rights should provide for this.

42 See, for example, Pearson, Noel, ‘To Be or Not To Be - Separate Nationhood or Aboriginal Self-determination and Self-government Within the Australian Nation?’ Aboriginal Law Bulletin 3:61 (April 1993) 14–17Google Scholar. See also Brennan, Frank, SJ, One Land, One Nation: Mabo - Towards 2001 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press 1995)Google Scholar.

43 Cf. Patton, Paul, ‘Mabo and Australian Society: Towards a Postmodem Republic,’ Australian Journal of Anthropology 6:1-2 (1995) 83–93, 89CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “ … it would be another form of racism to extend protection to indigenous communities only on the condition that they maintained and practiced a traditional form of life.“

44 Habermas, Jürgen, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1989), 232-3Google Scholar. It is not clear to me that this passage is consistent with Habermas's ‘constitutional patriotism’ and universalistic ‘discourse ethics.’ I discuss this issue in ‘On National Identity: A Response to Jonathan Rée,’ Radical Philosophy 62 (Autumn 1992) 14-19.

45 For an enlightening account of the tension between multiculturalism and special recognition of the Maoris of New Zealand, see Richard Mulgan, ‘Multiculturalism: A New Zealand Perspective,’ in Chandran Kukathas, ed., Multicultural Citizens. Mulgan brings out very clearly the way in which multicultural and separationist agendas tend to erode the cultural basis for extensive state intervention.

46 Earlier versions of this paper were read at the Macquarie University Philosophy Society, the Conference of the Australasian Association of Philosophy at the University of Queensland, and the Future of Nationalism and the State Conference at the University of Sydney. I thank the audiences on these occasions for discussion, comment, and encouragement. Thanks are also due to Bernhard Ripperger for research and to Lisabeth During for advice and criticism. Finally, thanks to the Research Management Unit of Macquarie University for support for this and associated projects.