MULTICULTURAL CITIZENSHIP: A CRITIQUE

2001 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 431-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTIAN JOPPKE

This article discusses the theory and practice of multicultural citizenship in liberal states. Regarding theory, I point to the shortcomings of both ‘radical’ and ‘liberal’ approaches to justify minority rights. Regarding practice, the state-centered notion of multicultural citizenship defects from the decentered accommodation of multicultural minority claims in functionnally differentiated societies. It also runs counter to a trend toward de-ethnicization in liberal states, in which the cultural impositions of the majority on minority groups are growing thin, thus removing the case for minority rights.

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 442-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana M. Landau

When Kosovo declared its independence in 2008, it did so not as a nation-state, but as a “state of communities,” self-defining as multiethnic, diverse, and committed to extensive rights for minorities. In this paper, this choice is understood as a response to a dual legitimation problem. Kosovo experienced both an external legitimation challenge, regarding its contested statehood internationally, and an internal one, vis-à-vis its Serb minority. The focus on diversity and minority rights was expected to confer legitimacy on the state both externally and internally. International state-builders and the domestic political elite in post-conflict Kosovo both pursued this strategy. However, it inadvertently created an additional internal legitimation challenge, this time from within Kosovo's majority Albanian population. This dynamic is illustrated by the opposition movement “Lëvizja Vetëvendosje” (Self-Determination Movement), which rejects the framing of Kosovo as first and foremost a multiethnic state. The movement's counter-narrative represents an additional internal legitimation challenge to the new state. This paper thus finds that internationally endorsed “diversity management” through minority rights did not deliver as a panacea for the legitimacy dilemmas of the post-conflict polity. On the contrary, the “state of communities” continues to be contested by both majority and minority groups in Kosovo.


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-192
Author(s):  
Roberta Medda-Windischer

In international law, minority rights instruments have been traditionally conceived for, and applied to, old minority groups with the exclusion of new minority groups originating from migration. Yet, minority groups, irrespective of their being old or new minorities, can be subsumed under a common definition and have some basic common claims. This allows devising a common but differentiated set of rights and obligations for old and new minority groups alike. This paper argues that the extension of the scope of application of legal instruments of minority protection, such as the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCNM), is conceptually meaningful and beneficial to the integration of new minorities stemming from migration. 


Author(s):  
Barbara Arneil

Colonization is generally defined as a process by which states settle and dominate foreign lands or peoples. Thus, modern colonies are assumed to be outside Europe and the colonized non-European. This volume contends such definitions of the colony, the colonized, and colonization need to be fundamentally rethought in light of hundreds of ‘domestic colonies’ proposed and/or created by governments and civil society organizations initially within Europe in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries and then beyond. The three categories of domestic colonies in this book are labour colonies for the idle poor, farm colonies for the mentally ill, and disabled and utopian colonies for racial, religious, and political minorities. All of these domestic colonies were justified by an ideology of domestic colonialism characterized by three principles: segregation, agrarian labour, improvement, through which, in the case of labour and farm colonies, the ‘idle’, ‘irrational’, and/or custom-bound would be transformed into ‘industrious and rational’ citizens while creating revenues for the state to maintain such populations. Utopian colonies needed segregation from society so their members could find freedom, work the land, and challenge the prevailing norms of the society around them. Defended by some of the leading progressive thinkers of the period, including Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, Peter Kropotkin, Robert Owen, Tommy Douglas, and Booker T. Washington, the turn inward to colony not only provides a new lens with which to understand the scope of colonization and colonialism in modern history but a critically important way to distinguish ‘the colonial’ from ‘the imperial’ in Western political theory and practice.


2021 ◽  
pp. 204382062110177
Author(s):  
Ning An ◽  
Jo Sharp ◽  
Ian Shaw

In this brief response paper, we respond to the insightful commentaries that critically engage with our original article in this forum. First, we discuss whether Confucian culture is fundamental to Chinese geopolitics, emphasizing how and why culture is part of a wider epistemic resource. We also note that our model is not normative, but an analytic framework for understanding complex non-western situations. Second, we discuss the geographies and scales of our model, noting a core tension between geopolitics at the state level and in everyday life. Third, we address the ‘gap’ between theory and practice under our Confucian model, noting that there is often a strategic inclusion (or exclusion) of Confucianism in practice. We finish by emphasizing that our paper is part a longer journey to further decentralize the western hold upon geopolitics.


1998 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 943-950 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Warbrick ◽  
Dominic McGoldrick ◽  
Geoff Gilbert

The Northern Ireland Peace Agreement1 was concluded following multi-party negotiations on Good Friday, 10 April 1998. It received 71 per cent approval in Northern Ireland and 95 per cent approval in the Republic of Ireland in the subsequent referenda held on Friday 22 May, the day after Ascension. To some, it must have seemed that the timing was singularly appropriate following 30 years of “The Troubles”, which were perceived as being between a “Catholic minority” and a “Protestant majority”. While there are some minority groups identified by their religious affiliation that do require rights relating only to their religion, such as the right to worship in community,2 to practise and profess their religion,3 to legal recognition as a church,4 to hold property5 and to determine its own membership,6 some minority groups identified by their religious affiliation are properly national or ethnic minorities–religion is merely one factor which distinguishes them from the other groups, including the majority, in the population. One example of the latter situation is to be seen in (Northern) Ireland where there is, in fact, untypically, a double minority: the Catholic-nationalist community is a minority in Northern Ireland, but the Protestant-unionist population is a minority in the island of Ireland as a whole.7 The territory of Northern Ireland is geographically separate from the rest of the United Kingdom. The recent peace agreement addresses a whole range of issues for Northern Ireland, but included are, on the one hand, rights for the populations based on their religious affiliation, their culture and their language and, on the other, rights with respect to their political participation up to the point of external self-determination. It is a holistic approach. Like any good minority rights agreement,8 it deals with both standards and their implementation and, like any good minority rights agreement, it is not a minority rights agreement but, rather, a peace settlement.


Author(s):  
T. Rovinskaya

The article considers the phenomena of e-democracy in its development from theory to practice. The following issues are covered: existing concepts of electronic citizens’ participation in political decision-taking, e-government as a form of open interaction of the state institutions with the public, technological base and international experience of using the mechanisms of e-democracy.


Author(s):  
Timothy Jacob-Owens

Abstract Multicultural citizenship, a set of group-differentiated rights for minority cultural groups, is now a common feature of most domestic legal systems in Europe. The conventional view, widely reflected in practice, suggests that ‘strong’ rights of this sort should be restricted to so-called ‘historical’ minorities. However, the increasingly long-standing presence of distinct cultural groups of immigrant origin raises the question of whether, and to what extent, the latter should also be granted stronger forms of multicultural citizenship. This article addresses this question by reference to the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, a central pillar of the international minority rights regime in Europe. The article analyses the application of the treaty to immigrant-origin groups in the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom, showing that the scope of protection afforded to such groups is stronger than previously assumed, though less far-reaching as compared to their ‘historical’ counterparts.


2021 ◽  
pp. 125-133
Author(s):  
A. V. Yaschenko

The article attempts to assess the results of the development of the Russian economy from the moment of privatization to the present. The urgency of the problem lies in the fact that, despite significant resources, including human capital, the economy is stagnating, there are no structural reforms, and high-tech companies do not appear. The main thing is not creating conditions for business development on the principles of self-organization: entrepreneurship, initiative, personal competence and investment. Reforming the socio-economic system of the USSR has no historical analogue, and is perceived as a unique practice of testing some theoretical positions and hypotheses that guided researchers and entrepreneurs in the framework of a market economy, for example, the theory of market equilibrium, theory of the firm, theory of preferences, and others. Russia has demonstrated a kind of phenomenon, both from the point of view of theory and practice of market transformations, when it is not entrepreneurship, not the investment activity of business and the population, but the narrowly selfish interests of persons affiliated with the government, began to determine market processes, such an economy was called the «economy of individuals», And in the case of a direct focus on the state budget,» the economy of the distribution». The transformations could be based on the market experience of a large number of countries, both developed and developing (China), this has not been done. Time was lost on the creation of new jobs; in the industrial orientation of the state, there were no priorities for the development of important industries for national competitiveness. As a result, the economic growth was lost.


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