CHAPTER V

CHAPTER V

MULTICULTURALISM AND

THE BOUNDS OF CIVIL SOCIETY

WILLIAM A. BARBIERI

PRELIMINARIES

The 1995 referendum on independence for Quebec, as alarming as it has been for many North Americans, is only a particularly conspicuous example of a contest enacted daily around the globe. A glance at the New York Times on any given day is likely to reveal a grab bag of stories involving the struggles of various social groups to redefine the shape of the societies in which they live. Often—for example, in South Africa, or Chechnya, or the former Yugoslavia—what is at issue are boundaries between societies. More often, however, it is boundaries within societies that are in dispute. These are the gradations of membership, the distinctions of status, the delineations of identity that divide the groups within a society and stamp the lives of those who belong to them.

Consider these cases: In Germany, a sizable immigrant minority seeks improved access to citizenship, state-supported bilingual education and protection from right wing, anti-immigrant violence. In Israel, Palestinian citizens of the Jewish state push for an equalization of state funds for Jewish and Arab communities, for affirmative action in hiring and government, and for cultural autonomy. In the U.S., the controversy of the week may concern hiring quotas, gerrymandering to favor minority candidates, the inclusiveness of the Western literary canon, the rites and rights of Native American religious groups, Afrocentric education, ex-clusively Hasidic school districts or a host of other topics.

These are all problems of multiculturalism: they are, that is, problems posed by the presence of cultural diversity within social and political orders that combine, usually uneasily, a commitment to individual equality with attempts to preserve a particular national identity. Multicultural issues typically pit against one another competing views on a distinctive set of concerns, involving the meaning of equal treatment, the fairness of compensation for past injustices, and the rights of groups to maintain their identities in the face of dominant majority cultures. They turn, in short, on questions of justice, and for this reason they demand the attention of those disciplines concerned with morality and ethics.

In addressing the problem of just arrangements for a multicultural society, we are right to focus on questions about equitable distribution, equal treatment, fair representation and the like.1 Often, however, we overlook a crucial, logically prior question—namely, who belongs to "society" in the first place? We neglect to ask: Distributions within what boundaries? Equality within which community? Representation for whom? The problem of multiculturalism—of justice in the political community—ineluctably thrusts us back upon the broader question of the justice of the political community. According to what criteria should the boundaries of community be demarcated? Who ought to count as a member, and in what ways? Of whose common good ought we to speak? On this deceptively obvious set of questions regarding what I propose we call structural or constitutive justice, the entire Western tradition of political thought surprisingly is strikingly reticent.

That who counted as an Athenian was not a particularly troubling question for someone like Aristotle is, perhaps, under-standable given the cultural and geopolitical climate in which he lived and thought. That a Rawls or a Habermas does not come squarely to grips with this question, however, calls for some explanation. How do we establish who is eligible to join us in the original position, or within which social context does the discourse of communicative action take place? It appears that ancient assumptions about the givenness, indeed the naturalness, of the body politic continue to assert themselves in contemporary theory, in the form of a largely uncritical acceptance of the institution of modern nation-state citizenship as the basis for defining the scope of distributive justice, civil rights, political equality and other important values charac-terizing the civil society.2

But our post-modern context makes it impossible to overlook that political communities do not simply grow on trees. They are rather, we could say products of a sort of genetic engineering in which collectivities are molded through the manipulation of borders, migration patterns, national identities, economic relations, fertility and a range of other parameters. Polities are, in short, shaped by people; not always in a coordinated fashion perhaps, but through purposive human action nonetheless. Moreover, this action is free.3 The ethical significance of this is immense, for it means that the outlines of societies, and the divisions within, fall within the sphere of moral responsibility. That the construction of social boundaries is not always carried out in an explicit or intentional manner is not in itself grounds for saying that we are not answerable for the results. The mistake we make in taking the shape of the society in which we find ourselves as necessary or given, and hence immune to moral criticism, is akin to the mistake we make if we fail to hold polluters accountable for the unforeseen environmental consequences of their actions. Where it is possible to expand our knowledge of our agency and its effects, we become negligent insofar as we fail to do so.

It is courting unnecessary ambiguity to say simply that "people" or "we" are the agents who constitute society. At present the human and social sciences remain somewhat impoverished when it comes to describing the exact nature of collective action or communal agency.5 Still, our knowledge of the subtle and less than subtle ways in which we structure our societies has been sharpened in recent decades by thinkers across a variety of disciplines in their work on nationalism, on the formation of racial and ethnic identity, on the construction of citizenship, and on many related topics.5 At the same time, critical work carried out in conjunction with social movements on behalf of women, workers, ethnic minorities, and other groups has developed insights into the webs of relations through which hierarchy and domination arise and are maintained.6 As a result, we have at our disposal the tools for a rough under-standing of the social agency through which we shape ourselves as peoples, nations, lands, cultures and societies. And this is all that is required to ground an ethical inquiry into the formation of our political communities.

CONSTITUTIVE JUSTICE

Who belongs to the community? And in what ways? From the premise of our accountability for the shape of our polities flow the basic questions of constitutive justice, among which we may distinguish external and internal issues. The external issues ("Who belongs?") deal with the scope or outlines of communities: How are borders established? On what basis is membership awarded? How is migration handled? Is the size of the population regulated? and so on. Internal questions ("In what ways?") bear on the character or constitution—in two senses7—of the community: Do all belong equally? Who has a voice? How are power and resources distributed? Is belonging understood in individualistic or group-related terms? Where is the line between "public" and "private"? In societies that are not culturally homogeneous—and it is difficult to think of any that truly are—the internal dimension of constitutive justice often takes the form of the question of multiculturalism. Broadly speaking, this is the question of the extent to which the structure of a political community should take account of cultural diversity. Ultimately, of course, the internal and external questions are two sides of the same coin.

If we understand civil society not as a "space" distinguished from the state and the economy within a given political community, but as a mode or set of roles accessible to all members, then the shape of civil society is a matter of both external and internal issues of constitutive justice. In the contemporary discourse of civil society, the external question of membership—of who belongs to the civil society—has been largely neglected. The internal question of multiculturalism, however, has been recognized as a burning issue of the day. In large part this is due to the way in which multiculturalist debates accentuate the tension between two important values for civil society, unity and equality. The aim of nurturing a cohesive national civil culture of a sort that can provide a basis for effective democratic politics often collides with the commitment of the modern civil society to egalitarianism and inclusiveness.8

There are several levels at which the ethical question of multiculturalism confronts us. In the first instance, we face a variety of applied normative issues. Some of these concern substantive matters—language rights, employment, education, cultural autonomy—while others are procedural in nature. Debates over these issues necessarily lead us to a theoretical level concerned with the definition of key terms such as culture, group rights, communal agency and oppression. Ultimately we must address those tantalizing meta-ethical questions having to do with the nature of equality, the ontological status of individuals and groups, and the problem of criteria for adjudicating among competing normative conceptions of community.

Where, then, should an analysis of the problem of multi-culturalism and constitutive justice begin? In my view, the most sensible place to start is with the context of discrimination, oppression and marginalization that gives rise in practice to demands for the recognition of diversity and group rights in modern societies. We should begin, in a word, with injustice.9

INJUSTICE

As slavery, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing and many like episodes have shown, injustice toward social groups is closely correlated with what might be termed "injustice"—the notion that moral claims to just and equal treatment are bounded by the confines of an ingroup. Injustice is premised on, first, the exclusion, and secondly the subordination of those who do not belong to the ingroup. It is fruitful to view the unjust treatment of groups in terms of three interrelated types of subordination, which I call ethno-national discrimination, socioeconomic inequality and formal disadvantage. These forms of subordination, it turns out, are bound up intimately with the basic processes through which modern political com-munities constitute themselves.

Ethno-national discrimination is fueled by the process of nation-building through which polities attempt to establish a unified communal identity. The standardization of language, the creation of national symbols and the writing of a collective history are some of the tools of choice here.10 Nation building depends heavily upon the enhancement of distinctions between a dominant cultural identity and other competing ones, and so it aims at cultivating a preference for members of its own group over outsiders, who become cast as the "other." We may call this phenomenon chauvinism, or—when, as often happens, it is linked with race—discrimination. In Germany, the word for it is "Ausländerfeindlichkeit," and foreign residents there may become acquainted with it in a variety of ways—in the attack on the train, in the refusal of admission to a nightclub, in the disproportionate likelihood of being charged with a crime, in the poor prospects of career advancement. Palestinian citizens of Israel experience in comparable ways their exclusion from their country’s (Jewish) national identity.11 The United States, strictly speaking, is not in its composition a nation state but rather a nations state; even so, it is marked by an ongoing struggle to define a core "American" identity12—an identity ignorant of the rest of North and South America, an identity with a capacity for exclusion reflected in the phenomenon of hyphenated Americans, in the nativist politics of a Pat Buchanan or a David Duke, in markers of racial consciousness from Derrick Bell to The Bell Curve.

Socioeconomic inequality, while related to discrimination, is driven largely by the dynamic of state building—the consolidation of an integrated economic and administrative unit under the authority of a central political power. State building benefits from, perhaps even depends upon, the exploitation of some class of people viewed as not fully belonging to the society in question. Not incidentally, this role often is played by specific cultural minorities. Post-World War II German society has profited greatly from the existence of the so-called guestworkers who have filled the bottom rung of the social hierarchy in employment, education and housing. The same can be said of Israeli Palestinians, who, with their relatives from the territories, provide a vital source of cheap and mobile labor.13 Yet those communities are provided inferior social services—or ignored entirely—by the state. While the U.S. has a long history of subordinating different immigrant groups—witness the old N.I.N.A. signs—it is safe to say that non-immigrants—blacks and Native Americans—have most consistently occupied the bottom spot on the totem pole.

Formal disadvantaging of groups, finally, occurs in a systematic process of legal and political subordination accompanying what I have come to call, in distinction from nation and state building, civitas building. The category of citizenship carries with it the basis for making qualitative distinctions between the citizenry and other residents in a society. In Germany, the sizable minority of resident Turks, while indistinguishable from their German neighbors in most respects, are ineligible to vote and subject to a separate system of laws applying to "aliens." While members of the Palestinian minority in Israel, in contrast, enjoy citizenship, enough legal and political constraints exist to cause them to insist, with good reason, that they are second-class citizens.14 The U.S., meanwhile, entertains a range of anti-immigrant measures, such as California’s Proposition 187, that would perpetuate the exclusion of the country’s least privileged resident population.16

Discrimination, inequality and disadvantage work together to constrain and incapacitate certain groups in the civil society, to the benefit of others. If we accept, on democratic or other grounds, the proposition that the forms of subordination that result from these processes are unjust, we are faced with the question of how to alter the dynamics at issue. Responses to this challenge are necessarily informed by the types of agency involved in each process.16 Because ethno-national discrimination is fostered largely through discourse and symbolic action, combatting it is a subtle, complex and hazardous business, as the stigmatization of "political correctness" in the U.S. has amply illustrated.18 Socioeconomic inequality is likewise hard to address directly, for it is generated through extremely complicated and diffuse patterns of interaction. The most promising line of attack focuses on political and legislative strategies of inclusion; for politics is the arena of social agency par excellence, and through it the ethno-national and socioeconomic spheres may be influenced indirectly. Accordingly, the campaign against subordination finds its main arena in public policy debates and those aspects of the legislative process that may be brought to bear on the problems of multiculturalism.

PUBLIC POLICY DEBATES

The status of minorities in contemporary Western societies is in large part determined, and hence may be revised, through political decisions on a range of issues all having to do with the structure of the political community.

Chief among these is the area of immigration and naturali-zation policy. States today are able to control both the size and the status of different groups within their territories by regulating admissions: to the territory, through immigration policy, and to full membership in the society through naturalization policy. For historical reasons, Israel and Germany both have laws which grant a right of immigration to members of the dominant national group who live abroad. Israel, indeed, relies upon immigration to maintain its Jewish majority. In Germany, many have argued, a less stringent naturalization policy would do much to ameliorate the subordination of the Turkish minority.18

A second crucial issue is the franchise: Who gets a voice? Germany excludes its non-citizen residents not only from national elections, but from local ones. Universal suffrage, meanwhile, only goes so far in ensuring fair representation, hence the ongoing dispute in the U.S. over redistricting plans that aim to build-in a measure of parity for minority groups.20

Of comparable significance are problems of distributive justice. How are we to counteract the deeply entrenched socio-economic subordination of groups? In order to counteract group-related inequalities in employment, education and housing a spectrum of compensatory strategies has arisen, ranging from the rather modest notion of affirmative action to the considerably more sweeping concept of quotas.20 While Germany and Israel have not yet warmed much to such measures, voices are growing in their support. In the U.S., of course, affirmative action had a well-established, though now controverted, record. The more ambitious approach to rectifying historic injustices embodied in the notion of quotas, on the other hand, has found the individualistic soil of the U.S. less than hospitable.

Civil rights legislation constitutes a fourth important venue for addressing constitutive injustice. Legal measures prohibiting discrimination based on an individual’s membership in a minority group provide an influential means of opposing subordination. In this area the U.S. has an extensive body of civil rights laws. Germany, however, has been reluctant to follow the example of other European countries, such as the Netherlands, that have enacted anti-discrimination laws; in Israel the passage of civil rights guarantees has been bogged down in constitutional disputes over the relative significance of religious authority and democratic politics.

Another major area of contention concerns group rights in regard to language, education, cultural practices, religion and regional autonomy. For many, the heart of the issue of multiculturalism has to do with the protection of various aspects of group identity against either assimilation to a dominant identity or erosion at the hands of the culture of individualism.21 In Germany, Turkish residents seek the right to cultivate their language, to practice their religion on equal terms with Germans, and to revise curricula that instruct them in the history of their "Teutonic forefathers." Israel’s Palestinians increasingly seek a sort of cultural autonomy which would grant them greater control in matters of education, language and culture.22 U.S. issues include, for example, bilingual teaching, Afrocentric education, tribal sovereignty and the rights of minority religious communities.

National symbols, finally, also provide a noteworthy locus for mediating belonging in a society. Whether central tools of nation-building, such as the flag or the national anthem, are inclusive of minorities or not is a common issue in discussions of multiculturalism.

PRINCIPLES OF CONSTITUTIVE JUSTICE

Debate on these concrete issues tends to elicit a range of attitudes toward the basic multiculturalist proposition that the constitution of society ought to give cultural diversity its due. These attitudes differ in their understandings of the proper scope of justice, in how inclusive they are, and in their understandings of equality.23 Most importantly, they differ on what is perhaps the most compelling issue raised by multiculturalism, namely, the nature of groups and group rights.24 The main competing positions on these issues may be linked with a set of distinct principles of constitutive justice.

The Closure Principle. This particularistic view holds that political communities should be organized in accordance with "natural" boundaries based on ethnic or blood ties, a shared history and a common ascriptive identity. In the West, this notion of an essential link between birth into a historical community and political membership has found influential exponents in Hooker, Coke and Filmer in the British common law tradition; Bodin and later Bossuet in France; and Herder and a whole succession of theorists of the nation in Germany. Advocates of closure generally assume a single group’s historic right to a specific territory. Often, the community is conceived of as a single organic entity with a life of its own. Membership is determined by birth, and exchanging one’s community is ruled out. The purpose of political life is to preserve the group, and great emphasis is placed upon homogeneity. Distinctive minorities, it follows, may and indeed should be removed. The closure principle lies behind the phenomenon of ethnic cleansing, behind the cry of "Ausländer’ raus!" and behind the efforts of Jewish extremists to expel all Palestinians from Eretz Israel.25

The Culture Principle. A similarly particularistic but less exclusive view holds that the legitimate unit for political self-determination is a collectivity of persons united by a common culture and sense of mutual commitment. Historically, this idea, which harks back to the Greek polis, has had notable advocates in Burke and a long line of republican thinkers from Cicero to John Adams. In deemphasizing the significance of blood ties in favor of cultural assimilation, the culture principle assigns a basic value to individual choice and commitment.26 The political community, it is held, should consist of a group of like-minded members who band together to nurture their common identity and who reserve the right to accept or reject new members. Arguments for this view often combine an invocation of the right to self-preservation of the group with the claim that cultural homogeneity is a precondition for a viable democracy. Minority groups have a choice: assimilate, be excluded or leave. This continues to summarize the official line in Germany.

The Choice Principle. This view maintains that the individual’s right to freedom of association should serve as the fundament of any political community. This perspective, while essentially modern and liberal in character, is grounded in a strain of thought on consent stretching back to the Sophists; it also has important roots in the work of Locke and Jefferson. Group identities are incidental in this view, and group rights are not recognized. Membership in society is contingent on each person’s willingness to belong and to pay the requisite price in terms of commitment or allegiance.27 It follows from this that each should be able to choose not only which organization to belong to, but also the extent of his or her membership and participation. Hence, increases in rights and privileges may be attached to increasing costs in terms of time of residence, military service or other contributions to society. Given that all people do not insist on full involvement in the communities in which they live, this view may lead to layered polities containing a variety of different levels of membership, in addition to multiple or divided memberships. Cultural diversity should be neither hindered nor encouraged. To a large extent, contemporary European societies, with their "guestworkers" and other permanent residents, reflect this model.

The Coexistence Principle. A fourth view proposes that the polity be shaped to fit those who live, work and participate over time in the life of a territorially defined community. Prominent in the historical pedigree of this notion are certain strains of Roman law, early modern formulations of the jus gentium by natural law jurists such as Vitoria and Grotius, and the ideological legacy of the French and American revolutions. This perspective emphasizes the importance of one’s role as an integrated legal and economic actor in a functioning, structurally cohesive social entity. Such participants are held to constitute the political community and are regarded as its members, subject to their approval. Consequently, birth or long residence in the society, not membership in a racial or cultural group, is taken as the basis of belonging. No one cultural identity is thus accorded dominance; established subgroups are tolerated, perhaps even entitled to maintain their group identities on equal terms with one another. This view is presently embodied in some measure in states with jus soli citizenship policies such as the U.S. and Canada.

The Cosmopolis Principle. This approach to political organization insists that humans ought to be recognized as belonging ultimately to a single universal polity. Cosmopolitanism, typically associated with groups at the left end of the European political spectrum, can claim antecedents in, among others, the Stoics, Kant and Marx. All persons, it holds, have an inalienable right to political participation; hence they are entitled to be represented in any deliberations which affect them. In this radically democratic conception what is decisive in determining who counts are the bounds of the effects of political decisions. This perspective, in its logic, transcends the traditional state system, supporting the case for transnational forms of representation and the idea of a "global civil society."28 The attitude it embodies toward multiculturalism is one of active support; the right to cultural membership is on a par with the right to political membership, as is the right to migration. "Open borders" and minority protections are frequent commitments urged by cosmopolitans.29

PROSPECTUS

How to adjudicate among these competing principles of constitutive justice remains an open question. One place a critical strategy may begin is with an assessment of the empirical claims brought in support of various normative stances with respect to the shape of political communities. For example, do democracies really require cultural homogeneity in order to function? If so, of what sort? On questions like these, experience must be our guide.

At the same time, the matter of the internal coherence of competing conceptions of community cannot be ignored. Can it make sense, for example, to insist that the boundaries of self-determining political units should be defined according to the freely disposed wills of individuals, when individuals tend so notoriously to disagree over affairs of politics? No less than other forms of moral discourse, arguments about constitutive justice may be required to answer to the canons of logic and reason.

Beyond this, it seems to me, the vying perspectives may be faulted insofar as their underlying conceptions of persons—their political anthropologies—are implausible or unconvincing. We are not the atomistic, autonomous individuals presupposed by the choice principle any more than we are the situated components of an organic group in the way assumed by the closure principle. We are rather, in different, constitutive ways, at once universal, communal and voluntaristic beings, and this is something that a convincing notion of constitutive justice will have to recognize. In my view, the widely endorsed notion of human rights may provide a basis for a compelling argument to the effect: (1) that political societies are obligated to grant full membership to their established residents both as individuals and as groups, and (2) that this will generally necessitate "multiculturalist" arrangements which acknowledge and protect certain group rights. But that is an argument for another day.

NOTES

1. Iris Young, however, cogently notes the dangers involved in relying too heavily on a "distributive paradigm" in talking about justice (1990, 15-38).

2. A notable exception to this is Michael Walzer’s work dealing with membership in the political community (1983, 31-63). For some criticisms of his view see Brown 1981. Robert Dahl also devotes some attention to the problem of criteria for inclusion in the polity (1989, 119-31).

3. This freedom must be understood, I would suggest, as of a contextual nature. For a theological understanding of the role of human agency in the making of society see Davis 1994.

4. Some promising stabs in this direction are Giddens 1984, Honneth and Joas 1988 and Gilbert 1992.

5. Anderson 1991, Gellner 1983, and Hobsbawm 1990 are influential treatments of nationalism; representative analyses of race and ethnicity and group identity are, respectively, Goldberg 1993, Barth 1969 and Tajfel 1981; on citizenship, see Tilly 1975 and Brubaker 1992.

6. The contributions of feminist theorists—e.g., Fraser 1989, Bartky 1990, Benhabib 1992—have been especially useful here. See also Foucault 1979 and Walzer 1993.

7. The thoughtful essays in Calvert 1991 are organized around Thomas Paine’s proposition that "the constitution of the people, their character as citizens and as a society, is `antecedent’ to the government formally established by a written constitution" (xi).

8. On the egalitarianism of the civil society see Cohen and Arato 1994, 18f. For an attempt to reconcile this tension see Habermas 1995.

9. On the matter of the epistemological priority of justice or injustice I tend to agree with those who see injustice as prior: our reasoning about justice is grounded in our experience of unjust treatment and not vice versa (cf. Wolgast 1987, Shklar 1986).

10. Levin et al 1993 gathers together a range of reflections on the significance of various aspects of nationhood. Critical perspectives on nationalism include Kristeva 1993 and Matustik 1993.

11. The Israeli Arabs’ experience of "otherness" is examined in Dominguez 1989, 153-188. See also Kimmerling 1992.

12. Useful on this topic is Moore 1986. On the U.S. "culture wars" see Hunter 1991.

13. Portugali 1993.

14. For detailed analysis of legal discrimination against Israeli Palestinians see Kretzmer 1990 and Peled 1992.

15. Karst 1989 and Shklar 1991 are excellent surveys of the history of civitas-building in the U.S.

16. Smiley 1992 grapples with some of the problems involved in assessing moral responsibility in complex social interactions.

17. Cash 1995 presents an analysis of the manner in which ideological constructions of community have shaped the political conflict in Northern Ireland.

18. I make this case in a forthcoming book. See also, e.g., Cohn-Bendit 1993 and Schmalz-Jacobsen et al 1993.

19. An excellent treatment of this issue is Thernstrom 1987.

20. Fiss 1976 is an incisive source on the question of affirmative action as a collective right.

21. On the nature of group rights, Garet’s Sartrean interpretation (1983) is particularly illuminating. Taylor et al 1992 and Kymlicka 1995 ably pose many of the theoretical issues surrounding the notion of group rights. Several essays addressing this issue in the Canadian context are collected in Baker 1994. See also Sanders 1991 and Mills 1994.

22. Ozacky-Lazar & Ghanem 1990, Bishara 1993.

23. On equality, see Turner 1986 and especially Rae 1989.

24. On group rights see May 1987 and Van Dyke 1985.

25. Reflections on modern manifestations of the logic of closure are collected in Ignatieff 1993.

26. According to Tamir 1992, this makes it possible to speak of a liberal nationalism.

27. A defense of the centrality of consent in matters of immigration and citizenship is provided by Schuck and Smith 1985.

28. Bauböck 1994 makes the case that transnational forms of membership are both increasingly feasible and morally desirable.

29. Carens 1987 treats the moral logic behind the idea of open borders. See also Beitz 1983.

REFERENCES

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Brubaker, Rogers. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Harvard, 1992.

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Davis, Charles. Religion and the Making of Society. Cambridge, 1994.

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Fraser, Nancy. Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory. Minnesota, 1989.

Garet, Ronald. "Communality and Existence: The Rights of Groups," Southern California Law Review, 54 (1983), 1001-75.

Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Blackwell, 1983.

Giddens, Anthony. The Constitution of Society. University of California, 1984.

Gilbert, Margaret. On Social Facts. Princeton, 1992.

Goldberg, David Theo. Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Blackwell, 1993.

Habermas, Jürgen. "Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the Future of Europe." In Ronald Beiner, ed., Theorizing Citizenship. SUNY, 1995.

Hobsbawm, Eric J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge, 1990.

Honneth, Axel and Hans Joas. Social Action and Human Nature. Cambridge, 1988.

Hunter, James Davison. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. Basic, 1991.

Ignatieff, Michael. Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism. Vintage, 1993.

Karst, Kenneth L. Belonging to America: Equal Citizenship and the Constitution. Yale, 1989.

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DISCUSSION

Civil society raises a number of issues, among which one is: who is involved, who belongs?

It was suggested that it was sufficient to assure the human rights of the individual and that this could be done by universal legislation. On the other hand, it was noted that the individual is an abstraction from reality. In fact there are no simply single entities, but all are born in relation one to another: this is basic for all issues of civil society. Thus, the question of who belongs and of the belongingness—not individual rights—is the fundamental issue for civil society.

Further the assurance of individual human rights, while im-portant, doteraction which is received by a person from his or her family and neighborhood and which enable a person to relate socially to others.

If this be the case, then there is in addition an issue of how minority cultural solidarities are to be included as units in the larger society. This is the analogue of the issue of individual human rights on the part of single individuals, namely, how can the identity of rights of a cultural group or solidarity be recognized. This is not to deny that there is an issue of the rights of an individual vis-a-via especially a strong central government or a strong group identity. But this is but one issue, and the one to which an individualist culture tends to be sensitive, while at the same time being characteristically insensitive to the identity and rights of groups.

What is basic here is a sensitivity not merely to the individual as an atom counterpoised to all others, but to the individual as a unique person who as such is not simply self-inclosed but is open and related to others. This reflects a deeper metaphysical attitude regarding reality as basically a unity, and whose diversity is derivative. Hence, this diversity in its many modes reflects a unity of origin and of direction; its members are essentially, not accidentally, interrelated. In this light one’s identity is not exclusive of others ,but more fundamentally is participational in a unity, and hence is solidary with others.

The great manifestation of this cannot then be legal definitions which purposively abstract from the actual exercise and expression of this free interpersonal action, but is rather in the very exercise of social life. Hence, an approach to these issues needs to be existential, beginning from the conscious and caring practice of social solidarity. Related theory must arise from this and can then proceed to theoretical clarification. Moreover, such theory must return to practice in order to have concern for the reality of human beings in the self-transcendence and solidarity which characterize the reality of persons.

In doing this one naturally is dealing in terms of the cultural solidarities in which human life is lived. This directs attention in turn to the transcultural and intercultural interchange in which values are lived not only with others who share them, but with others whose value pattern differs.

Further, as these groupings are different they are also unequal. Hence the theory of subsidiarity becomes essential for enabling and promoting the exercise of personal life in society. This is not something which takes place without the participation of peoples; it must rather be their major and distinctive accomplishment, namely, the achievement of constructing a society in which all can participate and human life can be lived to the fullest. This is the task of civil society.