Culture

1. Defining Culture
Defining the term “culture” is very challenging: it has
been described as both a “notoriously overbroad concept”
(Song 2009: 177) and a “notoriously ambiguous concept”
(Eisenberg 2009: 7). It is deployed in multiple ways: as the entry
will go on to consider in more length, the term “culture”
can refer to the set of norms, practices and values that characterize
minority and majority groups, for example by noting that the Hasidic
Jewish communities in New York practice a unique
“culture”, or by describing Italian or Senegalese culture.
But it is also used in other ways, for example, to refer to
“bro” culture or “hipster” culture, or the
culture of British football fans. Moreover, any one person can be a
member of multiple cultures—someone (like this writer!) can be a
member of the Canadian culture, the Ottawan culture, the Jewish
culture, and the academic culture at the same time. Contextual
considerations will explain why the norms, practices, and values that
define each of these cultures become relevant at a particular moment.
Moreover, only some of these cultures have political and legal
relevance; only those that do are the focus of this entry.
In the political and legal spheres, there is widespread disagreement
about what culture is, and the next section is focused on
elaborating these distinct views of culture. There is however
considerable agreement that whatever it is, it matters to
people and the meaning and value it provides to the lives of
individuals are among the most important reasons, if not the most
important ones, to defend and protect it in legal and political
spaces. This value is why it is important to attempt to
discover what culture is and correspondingly why, and which aspects of
it in particular, should or should not be protected in the public
sphere. Notice that the observation that cultures are valuable to
people, and indeed that they bring value to the lives of individuals,
is not the same as saying that individual cultural practices are all
good. Any defensible account of culture must take seriously the
importance of culture in general without defending all of its
instantiations. There are four main ways in which culture has been
interpreted: as an encompassing group, as social formation, in
dialogic terms, and in identity terms.
1.1 Culture-as-encompassing-group
One way to think about culture is as a kind of all-encompassing whole,
which shapes all or most dimensions of our lives. It is perhaps Will
Kymlicka’s formulation of a “societal culture” that
is most responsible for generating serious reflection on the nature of
culture understood in this way. A societal culture
provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full
range of human activities, including social, educational, religious,
recreational and economic life, encompassing both public and private
spheres. (Kymlicka 1996: 76)
Kymlicka explains that a vibrant societal culture provides a
“context for choice”, i.e., it provides the resources that
individuals rely on to make sense of their world and the choices it
offers. On this account, nation-states are well-described as having a
societal culture, as are Indigenous groups and sub-state national
minority groups (for example, the Catalans or the Tibetans); immigrant
groups which sustain a range of cultural practices and norms even as
they integrate into a larger “societal culture” are
not.
Kymlicka is not alone in offering an encompassing account of culture.
Michael Walzer too offers such an account, proposing that we
understand political communities as “communities of
character”, in which members are bound by a “world of
common meanings” (Walzer 1983: 28). Avishai Margalit and Joseph
Raz also describe so-called “encompassing” groups, in
which their members
find in them a culture which shapes to a large degree their tastes and
opportunities, and which provides an anchor for their
self-identification and the safety of effortless secure belonging.
(Margalit & Raz 1990: 448)
Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal say of an encompassing group that
its culture “covers various important aspects of life”,
and in so saying, they offer as an example the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish
culture:
it defines people’s activities (such as Torah study in
Ultra-Orthodox culture), determines occupation (such as circumciser),
and defines important relationships (such as marriage). It affects
everything people do: cooking, architectural style, common language,
literary and artistic traditions, music, customs, dress, festivals,
ceremonies…the culture influences its members’ taste, the
types of options they have and the meaning of these options, and the
characteristics they consider significant in their evaluation of
themselves and others. (Margalit & Halbertal 1994: 498)
Whereas Kymlicka emphasizes the freedom that is offered by a
robust societal culture, Margalit and Halbertal speak of its role in
securing members’ “personality identity”
(Margalit & Halbertal 1994: 502) and Walzer of its importance in
shaping a “collective consciousness”. Although these
scholars justify the protection of a robust culture for many reasons,
they agree that what culture does, fundamentally, is offer a
background value system that helps members select among options and
interpret their value, including for example with respect to certain
forms of employment, or education, or family structure and
child-rearing. Walzer captures the way in which culture informs how
even the most basic of things are understood:
a single necessary good, and one that is always necessary—food,
for example—carries different meanings in different places.
Bread is the staff of life, the body of Christ, the symbol of the
Sabbath, the means of hospitality, and so on. (Walzer 1983: 8)
Much is illuminated by these accounts of culture, including especially
why depleted societal cultures may be less able to provide the context
for choice that Kymlicka emphasizes, or why one’s
“personality identity” may thereby be threatened: if a
cultural group’s educational, political, or economic systems are
weakened, their capacity to support members to make sense of the
world, and choose among options, is likewise weakened. Moreover, this
account illustrates the wrong of undermining the cultures of others:
if a culture is undermined, the choices available to its members are
thereby reduced. We can see this with respect to Indigenous culture in
many states: where states have actively attempted to erase Indigenous
culture, the result has been severe social dislocation and alienation
among Indigenous peoples whose context for choice has been
substantially weakened.
However, multiple objections have been launched at this way of
understanding culture, most of which are variants on what is termed
the “essentialist” objection; notice, though, that the
views described above are not believed by their holders to be
essentialist. The essentialist objection targets what it sees as an
assumption that members of a culture will hold the same set of
practices, norms, and values to be important, and in the same measure.
But, say critics, this assumption does not hold: in any actual
culture, members will be differently committed to its defining
practices and norms, and indeed, there will necessarily be
disagreement around which of its practices and norms are defining in
the first place. The essentialist objection says, roughly, that
treating culture as encompassing wrongly does one of the following
things: 1) it proclaims that certain features of a culture are at its
core and therefore immutable, on pain of dissolving the culture
(Eisenberg 2009: 120), and correspondingly that cultures are
necessarily bounded and determinate rather than contested and
fluid (Moore 2019; Patten 2014: 38); 2) having identified these
features as at a culture’s core, it excludes those who believe
themselves to be members but do not  conform to, display, or
respect these features (Parvin 2008: 318–19); and, 3) it
ignores the reality that most people in a liberal society “draw
their identity from a multiplicity of roles and communities and
memberships at any one time” (Parvin 2008: 321), which can
variously have social salience, depending on the context, both
independently of, and sometimes in conjunction with, cultural
identities (Moore 2019). In summary, a too-encompassing account of
what culture is for its members runs the risk of treating the
boundaries of a culture as if they are determinate, unshifting, and as
though its members display no variance (and perhaps cannot display
variance) in their commitment to the culture as a whole and its
defining practices.
The alternative accounts of culture that are considered below are all,
at least in part, intended to respond to the essentialist challenge;
their objective is, in other words, to generate a plausible account of
what culture is, and correspondingly what it means to be a
member of a particular cultural group, that can be deployed to make
sense of legal and political controversies, and ideally adjudicate
among them, without succumbing to the essentialist challenge. A
caveat: the views of culture treated below should be understood as
“ideal types”, characterized so as to understand its key
features, how it is differentiated from other views, and why it does
not fall victim (in its own estimation) to the essentialist
challenge.
1.2 Culture-as-social-formation
One attempt to reconceive culture in a way that responds to the
essentialist challenge, but which retains a view of culture as largely
encompassing, proposes that cultures are defined by their
members’ shared experience of social formation (Patten
2014: 39). On this “social lineage” account of culture,
what makes a culture is that its members are subject to a
“set of formative conditions that are distinct from the
formative conditions that are imposed on others” (Patten 2014:
51). The experience of being subjected to common institutions,
understood broadly to include shared educational spaces, languages,
media, as well as shared historical traditions and stories,
overlapping familial structures, and so on, shapes a sense among
cultural group members that they share a distinct way of seeing the
world, and that certain assumptions that they possess are shared by,
or at least understood by, others. This view emphasizes a
culture’s historical trajectory, but does not require that its
defining norms, values and practices are unchanging over time. On the
contrary,
internal variation is possible because subjection to a common set of
formative influences does not imply that people will end up with a
homogeneous set of beliefs or values. (Patten 2014: 52)
As a result, cultures are sites in which members can contest and
deliberate their meaning with enough shared assumptions about
the way the world works that they can recognize each other as engaged
in the same project.
Patten writes of the institutions to which cultural group members are
subject that they are at least to some degree “isolated from the
institutions and practices that work to socialize outsiders”
(Patten 2014: 52), and thus serve to distinguish one culture from
another. On this view, significant emphasis is placed on who is
controlling the levers of the institutions that shape members’
formation: that is, it matters that members are in control of
the institutions to which they, themselves, are subject, so that
they can plausibly shape their own social experience, and the
experience of younger members, in fundamental ways. Where the control
over this social formation is denied, a culture’s members are
thereby harmed; when it is coercively denied, there is very likely an
injustice demanding remedy.
By focusing on the shared experience of subjection to common cultural
institutions, this account avoids the accusation that what defines a
culture is the stability of its basic norms and values over time:
culture is not, on this view, a static entity. Instead, what matters
is that cultural group members believe themselves to be members of a
cultural group, and that this belief’s foundation is in the
experience of common cultural institutions, rather than in the
specific practices that are central to the group. These central
practices can change fundamentally, without the cultural group itself
dissolving. However, this view is subject to criticism by scholars who
worry that those who control the levers of formation do not represent
the views of all members (Phillips 2018), that instead they are using
their relative positions of power to create and enforce cultural norms
and practices that do not command (or would not command, without
coercion) widespread agreement.
1.3 Culture-as-dialogue
The latter objection—that a so-called culture is the product of
some but not all of its members leads some scholars to rearticulate
culture in terms of the ways in which it is constructed via dialogue
among members and their engagement with each other. The purpose of
emphasizing that a culture’s members are the source of its main
practices, values and norms, is to emphasize that a culture is not
“given” to its members from above, as a fixed and
unalterable entity. Rather, members of a culture are, in a fundamental
way, its authors. Here is James Tully explaining this: cultures
are
continuously contested, imagined and reimagined, transformed and
negotiated, both by their members and through their interactions with
others. (Tully 1995: 11)
Seyla Benhabib similarly emphasizes the narrative aspect of
cultures, noting that insiders
experience their traditions, stories, rituals and symbols, tools, and
material living conditions through shared, albeit contested and
contestable, narrative accounts. (Benhabib 2002: 5)
That there is contestation among members, and that its main elements
are under constant negotiation, does not render a culture any less
meaningful for its members. What may seem confusing is the idea that a
contestable and constantly shifting culture warrants protection;
perhaps protection means artificially halting the natural changes that
a culture would undergo, by protecting elements of it at a moment in
time. But defenders of this view demand protection in the form of
ensuring that the forums in which culture is negotiated, shared and
transmitted, are sustained in robust and inclusive ways, and without
unwanted interference by forces external to the culture. As with the
culture-as-formation account, the emphasis is on the capacity of group
members to shape the norms and practices that are central, rather than
with the norms and practices themselves.
How does this view respond to the worry about asymmetrical power
distribution within a cultural group? Focusing on the ways in which a
culture’s central characteristics are determined via negotiation
among members is an attempt to be attentive to the power structures
that shape whose voice is heard during these negotiations, in
minority and majority cultures (Dhamoon 2006). In many, and indeed
perhaps in most, cultures, historically the dominant voices have been
male, and one impact of that has generally been a gendered view of the
how best to organize cultural life, that has reduced the rights
of women (and other minorities) in myriad ways, often to their
disadvantage as well as against their will. For some, the oppression
of less powerful members by those who hold the levers of power
generates at least partial skepticism about the value of protecting or
accommodating culture in liberal, democratic states, especially in
cases where it may seem that “multiculturalism is bad for
women” (Okin 1999). On this view, cultural practices that
undermine the rights of women (and other minorities) should not be
tolerated in liberal democratic states.
The recognition that many cultural practices are disadvantageous to
women (and other minorities) does not propel all political theorists
to adopt a skeptical attitude towards them in all cases. For some, it
is an opportunity to see that cultures can be valued even by those who
are putatively oppressed, even as they work from the inside to
influence the direction of their culture, towards less oppressive
norms and practices. For example, although often sidelined from their
centres of power, many women value their cultures in ways that press
them not to exit, but rather to engage in processes of reforming
inegalitarian practices and norms, from within (Deveaux 2007). This
way of thinking about culture and its contents celebrates, and
encourages, moves to “democratize” the mechanisms by which
a cultural group’s main norms, values and practices are adopted,
and defends public cultures that are genuinely open to multiple voices
(Lenard 2012).
This narrative or dialogic account of culture thus responds well to
the essentialist challenge, by denying that the defining features of a
culture must be static and equally valuable to all members of a
cultural group. But, it must respond to another challenge, namely, the
individuation challenge (Moore 2019). If an account of culture is
going to be robust enough to define the entities that should be
entitled to additional political and legal consideration in various
ways, including with respect to additional rights protections or
exemptions from certain legal and political requirements, it must also
be able to identify with some specificity the boundaries of a
particular, discrete, culture and who legitimately counts as a member
for the purposes of respecting the political and legal claims made as
a result. But this can be a challenge to accomplish.
To see why, consider Benhabib’s account of the ways in which
cultures are observed from the outside, and the way they are
experienced from the inside. The observer is largely
responsible, she says, for imposing “unity and coherence on
cultures”, whereas from the inside, its participants
experience their traditions, stories, rituals and symbols, tools, and
material living conditions through shared, albeit contested and
contestable, narrative accounts. (Benhabib 2002: 5)
One effect of understanding the culture in this way is that while many
of its members will hold deeply to the central values and take deep
satisfaction in participating in the central cultural traditions, many
others will dip in and out of its central practices, and pick and
choose among its central values and norms. So, just who
counts as a member is blurry, and this blurriness may appear to
be a problem when membership is said to confer rights and
privileges that are not available to non-members. There is an
inevitable tension between the need to individuate cultures for
political reasons and the boundaries of cultures which are inevitably
poorly demarcated. Only context will enable us to resolve the
political questions that will thereby emerge.
1.4 Culture-as-identity (or identity rather than culture)
To answer the challenge of how to identify a culture, and its members,
one proposal focuses on the subjective component associated with
belonging to a cultural group. Take this example, described by
Margaret Moore: although there is deep division in Northern Ireland
between Catholics and Protestants, the differences are neither
religious (the conflict is not about distinctive interpretations of a
religious text, and religious figures are not targeted for violence),
nor cultural, since surveys of cultural values of both communities
reveal considerable overlap among the values that competing
communities hold (Moore 1999: 35). She says, rather, a focus on shared
identities among rival groups makes more sense of the conflict. 
A largely or partly identity-focused view highlights that one key
dimension of culture is the way in which it shapes the identity of
cultural group members. As well, such a view highlights that culture
is a thing to which many people will have important
connections, but which will be defining for them in multiple
and distinct ways. An identity-focused view has clear merits: for
example, it can explain why individuals remain nominally attached to a
culture, even though its centrally defining features shift
historically over time, and even if they do not engage with some of
its more traditional aspects.
Additionally, an identity-focused view can accommodate identities that
are not obviously culturally based, for example, including LGBTQ+
identities (Eisenberg 2009: 20; for a discussion of cultural/identity
claims in an LGBTQ+ context, see Ghosh 2018: chapter 4). Indeed, an
identity-focused view aims to circumvent the difficulty of identifying
what specific material is legitimately cultural material. As noted
above, scholars of minority cultures frequently note that there
is a wide variety of claims made by a wide variety of groups, and
these groups are defined by an assortment of distinct characteristics,
including race, ethnicity, religion and sexuality. Say its defenders,
a focus on identity rather than culture may be preferable because
the term identity covers more ground in the sense that it can refer to
religious, linguistic, gendered, Indigenous and other dimensions of
self-understanding. (Eisenberg 2009: 2)
2. Minority Cultural Rights Claims
The four views of culture described above inform the cultural claims
that both individuals and groups make against the state. The specific
threats that individuals and groups face, and which demand a kind of
protection, are distinct, as are the responses that states may have in
response to the claims made by individuals and groups (Eisenberg 2009:
20–21). In some cases, claims are made for accommodations for
all members of a group qua group; in others, claims are made with
respect to particular individuals; and there may well be connection
among these. For example, a group may demand language protection
policies, or an individual may claim a right to speak her mother
tongue in legal proceedings. These rights are related to each other,
and may be in some cases derived from one another: one reason an
individual has a right to speak her mother tongue in legal proceedings
may be because the state has recognized her language as an official
language either of the state, or of a sub-state jurisdiction, for
example. As a matter of accommodation, it will be important
in what follows to notice when claims are made for accommodations that
apply to individuals and when they are accommodations that apply to
groups; although some philosophers are keen to assess whether cultural
rights are best understood as individual or group rights (Casals
2006), the analysis below proceeds by assuming that they can be both
(following Levy 2000: 125).
Notice as well that the term “accommodation” is a kind of
catch-all to include the wide range of claims an individual or group
can make against a state on the basis of culture. Political
philosophers have attempted to distinguish among these claims in
myriad ways, in order to make sense of them. Many such rights are
claimed by immigrant groups (typically) to a state, who require
certain accommodations from the state in order to better integrate
into that state. In the larger debate around the value of
multiculturalism, there is considerable discussion about which sorts
of accommodations encourage the integration of, especially, culturally
distinct newcomers, and which sorts permit or even encourage their
separation from the larger society (e.g., Sniderman & Hagendoorn
2007). Some scholars worry, as well, that a focus on how best to
accommodate cultural minority groups travels with ignoring (perhaps
wilfully) more important questions of redistribution to those who are
less well off (Barry 2001; Fraser 1995). In general, however,
multicultural theorists agree that accommodation rights are most
defensible when they support the integration of minorities in general,
and newcomers in particular, as well as when they are aimed at
remedying persistent inequalities between majority and minority
groups.
It is worth noting that not everyone readily agrees that
“culture” should be treated as a source of distinct legal
and political claims, however. For example, Sarah Song points
out that so-called “multicultural” claims are often
in fact claims to accommodate a wide range of groups, including
racial, religious and ethnic groups. Many political theorists of
cultural rights appear to believe that there are distinct and
recognizable cultural groups, making distinctive cultural claims,
whereas in their example-giving they rely on a “wide range of
examples involving religion, language, ethnicity, nationality, and
race” (Song 2009: 177). Rarely is “culture” alone
the basis for a claim against a state. Rather, says Song, so-called
cultural claims are in fact often demands for other
well-understood and defensible democratic goods. Most such
demands are for religious accommodations, well-defended by
standard liberal defenses of freedom of conscience; others are demands
for reparations for past and ongoing wrong, in the form of affirmative
action; others yet are demands for democratic inclusion, often
rooted in a morally problematic history of deliberate exclusion. Once
the reasons for these “cultural” demands are revealed
clearly, we will often find democratically defensible reasons to
respect and accommodate them, without needing to resort to relying on
culture as a distinct entity, giving rise to a distinct set of
rights-claims. The result is that the controversy associated with
properly defining cultures and identifying their members can be
avoided in many instances. However, this analysis can make it
difficult to treat cases where something called “culture”
interacts with, or supplements, religious, ethnic, and racial
claims.
Take the case of the choice, made by referendum, to ban minarets on
mosques in Switzerland. The defensibility of the ban has been the
subject of deliberation among political philosophers, and one key
point of contention has been whether and to what extent minarets are
religiously required by Islam. Many interpreters propose
that, since minarets are not obligatory according to Islamic religious
requirements, the choice to ban them is regrettable (because of what
it says about the public place of Islam in Switzerland), but it does
not violate the religious freedom of practising Muslims in
Switzerland, and as a result is permissible (Miller 2016). In making
this claim, however, what is ignored is the cultural
significance of minarets. Without a recognition of the distinct place
of culture in certain claims, a full understanding of the minaret case
cannot be reached. The same challenge can be seen in deliberations
around whether Muslim women should be permitted to wear face coverings
in public spaces. Some commentators suggest that, because (according
to some interpretations) Islamic texts do not appear to
require face coverings, women can be denied the right to
engage in this practice, without violating their religious freedom. In
making this argument, its defenders notice that the choice to cover
faces is in effect a (mere) cultural interpretation of
Islamic requirements, as evidenced by the fact that only some
communities of practising Muslims engage in the practice. For some
scholars, it is essential to separate religious from cultural
claims—liberal democratic states take religious claims
very seriously as matters of conscience, and have a long
history of zealously protecting religious freedom. So, having
determined that a claim is not one of religious freedom, such
scholars believe they can comfortably deny the request for
permission to cover faces in public spaces. However, ignoring the
cultural dimensions of the claim—or treating them as though they
are obviously of less significance than the underlying religious
claim—fails to treat the case properly. In particular,
it fails to take seriously that religious obligations necessarily
have cultural interpretations, that a full recognition of religious
freedom entails recognizing their cultural interpretations,
and that specifically cultural legal and political accommodation (of a
religious commitment) will thereby be called for.
In what follows, distinct types of cultural claims, made against a
state’s major institutions, will be examined. These claims are,
as will be seen, sometimes made by individuals and sometimes by
groups. Where relevant, the analysis will highlight whether the
concept of culture that is being deployed is culture-as-encompassing
group, culture-as-social-formation, culture-as-narrative, or
culture-as-identity. The analysis will not always be neat. In some
cases, there will be multiple defenses of a cultural right, which rely
on distinct understandings of culture.
2.1 Exemption rights
Perhaps the most familiar type of cultural claim made against the
state is in the form of request for exemptions from rules and
regulations that typically apply to all citizens. Exemption rights
respond to the fact that, in liberal democracies, laws and practices
are meant—genuinely—to treat all citizens equally, but
that there are some which inadvertently impose disadvantage on certain
minorities. The worry to be resolved is that minority citizens are
unintentionally or accidentally burdened by the normal application of
certain laws (Levy 2000: 130), in ways that treat them unfairly, which
can be resolved by exemptions from certain laws and normal practices
(Quong 2006; Gutmann 2003). The extension of exemption rights then is
understood as a
a recognition of that difference, as an attempt not to unduly burden
the minority culture or religion en route to the laws’
legitimate goals. (Levy 2000: 130)
For example, some Sikhs request exemption from laws that require
wearing motorcycle or construction-site helmets. Although Sikhism is a
religion, Sikhs describe the requirement that they wear a turban not
quite as a religious requirement, but rather as a symbol of their
faith and commitment to Sikh values, as well as an expression of their
identity (Sikh Faith FAQs in
Other Internet Resources).
Without exemption from these laws, Sikhs would be excluded from
taking advantage of opportunities that are meant to be available to
all citizens on an equal basis. The same is true of Indigenous
communities, who have requested exemptions from generally applicable
laws that limit hunting and fishing, explaining that such limits
undermine their traditional way of life, or make it hard (or
impossible) for them to sustain themselves (Levy 2000: 128). Before
Sunday-closing laws were abandoned in Canada and the United States,
religious minorities were occasionally granted exemptions from them.
In these cases, as described above and without legally provided
exemptions, people (usually minorities) must choose between
participating in opportunities that should be available to all
citizens on an equal basis or to respect their (cultural)
understanding of what their religion requires of them.
The request for exemption can be lightly distinguished from the
request for rule modification. As indicated, exemption requests are,
as they sound, requests that individuals be exempted from certain
requirements that are meant to apply to all citizens equally;
modification requests ask for changes in existing, majority, practices
to accommodate certain other, minority, practices. Sikhs sometimes
request exemption from laws that would, otherwise, require them to
remove their turban as above; in other cases, they request uniform
modifications, so that turbans are treated as one among several
available head coverings for those carrying out a specific
role. The same is true of uniform modification requests made by
Muslim women who cover their faces or heads, and Jewish men who wear
yarmulkes, where uniforms have traditionally required an uncovered
head or face, or where they have required particular head coverings
(as in the Sikh case, they may also be presented as requests for
exemptions). Similarly, when observant Muslims request short breaks in
their work day to pray at specific times of day, or when Jewish and
Muslim students ask for changes in the provision of foods (to
accommodate kosher and halal obligations) in school cafeterias, the
request is for modification rather than exemption.
In most cases, the early failure of a legitimate law to modify or
exempt new practices is unintentional. That is, the laws or practices
in place were not adopted intentionally with the purpose of excluding,
but were rather adopted under the assumption that they treat the
existing population fairly. But widespread immigration has diversified
many populations in substantial ways. Immigrants often travel with
practices and norms that are, when they arrive, unfamiliar to the
states they are joining, and as a result states are asked to modify
certain laws, and exempt newcomers from certain others. There may be
cases where there are legitimate public reasons to persist in applying
certain laws in spite of the disadvantage they generate for newcomers.
As well, there are cases where states persist in demanding obedience
to laws and practices that clearly disadvantage newcomers attempting
to integrate, but where there are no good mitigating factors to
justify persisting in the imposing of disadvantage (as when the Danish
town of Randers passed a law requiring that pork be served “on
an equal footing with other foods” in school cafeterias). In
these latter cases, the exclusionary impact of the laws is no longer
inadvertent, and they are generally condemnable for perpetuating
unnecessary and unjustified exclusion from political, economic and
social spaces.
It is not always the case that individuals or groups claiming cultural
rights to exemption and modification are immigrants, but that is often
the case. Indigenous communities ask for exemptions, as do certain
orthodox religious communities. These cases will be discussed below in
the section focused on cultural preservation.
2.2 Assistance rights
Demands for assistance call on the state to preserve the conditions
under which various elements of a culture can persist and even thrive,
especially minority languages, or to promote and protect cultural
associations in various ways, including by offering financial support
to artists from within these cultural groups, or by providing
resources to permit the production and distribution of ethnic-language
media. The justification for assistance rights is the same as for
exemption and modification requests: it is to prevent persistent
unfairness in access to rights or goods that are meant to be available
for all citizens on an equal basis. In the case of assistance rights,
cultural minority groups argue that the majority group has access
to these goods already, for example to a robust language or media
space, and so they request state resources to secure
these goods for cultural minorities as well. Here, whereas the
justification overlaps with the one offered to defend exemption and
modification rights—to generate fairness—the
understanding of culture that underpins the demand for these rights is
distinct. Typically, exemption and modification claims treat
culture-as-identity or dialogue, whereas in the case of assistance
claims, the background understanding of culture is often
culture-as-social-formation or culture-as-encompassing group; the
culture is treated as a whole that requires assistance to protect each
of its central parts, in order to do the job of shaping members
well.
2.3 Self-determination rights
Self-determination rights are those that confer substantial control to
sub-state jurisdictions over a particular territory and in particular
the right to run the major institutions on that territory. A
self-determining community is one that, because of control over major
institutions in a territory, is capable of making and enforcing
decisions, without interference by outsiders, in multiple policy
spaces (I. M. Young 2004). The justification for self-determination
rights is sometimes based on reparation or corrective justice, for
example where past state actions have undermined the capacity for a
particular cultural group to be self-determining in the first place
(Song 2009: 184). In other cases, the demand for self-determination is
justified with respect to the importance of protecting the autonomy of
a culturally distinct sub-state jurisdiction, that is, its capacity to
run its own affairs in ways that are consonant with its particular
cultural preferences. The right to self-determination typically relies
on an understanding of culture-as-encompassing group, or
culture-as-social-formation, suggesting that without significant
control over the major institutions that govern the lives of citizens,
the relevant group will not be able to be self-determining.
The right to self-determination is typically attributed to states, so
its meaning in the context of minority communities operating at the
sub-state level is not always clear. Among sub-state jurisdictions,
the right is often claimed by Indigenous groups as well as sub-state
national groups, like the Basques and the Scottish, whose
“societal culture” is manifestly distinct from the
majority’s societal culture. The demand for self-determination
is a demand to make choices about how children are educated, what
language is spoken by the relevant political authorities, and how the
public space should be organized. The right claimed has at least three
manifestations: 1) the right, at a minimum, to “maintain a
comprehensive way of life within the larger society without
interference”; 2) the right to recognition by the majority for
its way of life, and 3) the right to active backing by the majority to
affirmatively support the relevant way of life so that “the
culture can flourish” (Margalit & Halbertal 1994: 498).
These three interpretations make distinct demands on the state,
running from simple non-interference to active participation in
sustaining the conditions for self-determination. As a result, the
larger state is sometimes tasked with assessing the extent to which it
wants to direct its resources to supporting a particular request for
self-determination, focused on whether associated claims to cultural
preservation are warranted. These will be considered below.
2.4 Recognition rights
The demand for formal recognition in legal and political
documents often travels with the demand for self-determination, and is
grounded in a desire to have the majority mark its commitment to the
full and equal respect of a cultural minority group (Mcbride
2009). In the Canadian case, the Québécois have
long fought for recognition as a nation, with a “distinct
society”. Attempts to recognize Québec’s status in
the Canadian constitution have repeatedly failed, though a motion that
read “That this House recognize that the Québécois
form a nation within a united Canada” was approved (with
considerable controversy, however) by the House of Commons in 2006.
The demand for recognition in this case is a demand for respect as an
equal, national, founding partner of the Canadian state.
In the case of Indigenous communities as well, the right to
self-determination often includes not only the demand to exercise
authority over specific jurisdictions, but also for recognition.
They seek recognition, for example, as original inhabitants of a
particular state, or as nations in their own right, or as having been
the victims of various crimes at the hands of colonizers, including
the violation of early treaties between them, as well as demands for
state support in sustaining and, in many cases, rebuilding communities
that were actively devastated by colonizing/settler governments. In
Canada, and other colonizing states, for example, it has become common
to read land acknowledgement statements in advance of events
(including as part of the “announcements” read at the
beginning of a school day), recognizing that events and proceedings
are taking place on unceded Indigenous land.
Similarly, Australian Indigenous communities have long
argued for official recognition in the Australian constitution. From
the perspective of Australian Indigenous communities, the hope,
and indeed the expectation, is that official recognition will give
rise to additional rights and benefits, for example to greater voice
and political access to members of the minority. The hope for
additional rights and benefits is present in some, but not all, cases
of recognition claims (for example, it largely was not present in the
case of Québec).
Recognition comes in other forms beyond acknowledgement in legal and
political documents, that are intended to confirm respect for minority
groups. In some states, the languages of minority groups can be
officially recognized as national languages. For example, the
Romansh language in Switzerland is officially recognized as a
national language, even though its speakers make up less than 1% of
the country’s total population. By contrast, Turkish laws that
banned the speaking of Kurdish in public spaces were an attempt
to deny recognition to a national minority (lifted finally in 1991).
As with demands for official recognition in binding constitutional
documents, these sorts of recognition demonstrate respect for minority
communities as well as a commitment to treating them as full and equal
members of the larger state.
2.5 Cultural preservation rights
Cultural preservation rights are those that groups claim as key to
sustaining a cultural group as a cultural group. This right
is sometimes described as a right to the “survival of a
culturally-specific people” (Gutmann 2003: 75). In
some cases, the justification is based on the claim that
certain forms of exposure to and engagement with the wider community
will result in the erosion of a culture that is valued by its members.
In others, the justification is historical, as in where orthodox
religious groups, fleeing religious persecution in Europe, agreed to
settle new land in Canada and the United States in exchange for
religious freedom. In others, the central justification is
that cultural diversity is valuable and worth preserving, in and
of itself (Parekh 2000). (In some cases, cultural preservation
rights are claimed as recompense for past wrong; this claim is
considered separately, below.) Demands for cultural preservation
are most controversial where they are made by illiberal groups, as
will be detailed shortly.
It is worth dwelling here for a moment to notice that there are two
ways to interpret cultural preservation: it could mean the
preservation of a group as a distinct cultural entity or it could mean
the preservation of certain practices and values that are believed, at
a moment in time, to be central to the culture. Rights to cultural
preservation come in multiple formats, including demands for
exemption, parental autonomy, respect for internal conflict resolution
mechanisms (in family law, mainly), and control over membership. These
rights are justified with respect to preserving culture,
and typically rely on an understanding of culture-as-encompassing
groups or culture-as-social-formation, just as does the more general
right to self-determination with which they often travel.
Many minority illiberal groups ask only for rights of forbearance
against the state in which they live (Spinner-Halev 2000). In
response, a state may permit an illiberal cultural group to be
“left alone”, on the idea that so long as it can persist
without state support of any kind, it may do so. A state may be asked
to do more, however, to preserve the culture.
For example, a state may be asked to exempt community
members from certain requirements that are typically demanded of all
citizens, including mandatory schooling and child labour laws.
Consider this example: many orthodox Amish communities live a life
that is largely segregated from the wider community. They live a
religiously structured way of life which dictates whom members marry,
how they raise children, how they produce an economy that permits
their way of life to continue. In most cases, they demand neither
recognition nor additional financial support in order to protect their
communities’ way of life. They had previously demanded only
non-interference, for the most part. But, in the 1970s, some American
Amish communities demanded, and were granted, the right to withdraw
their children from mandatory education at the age of 14, arguing that
where their children were required to remain in school until the age
of 16, they were more likely to exit the community. This high rate of
exit would, they argued, result in the failure of the Amish way of
life to persist over time (Burtt 1994). The right of exemption the
Amish claimed was, in this case, derivative of the larger demand for
cultural self-preservation; without the exemption, they said, the
culture itself might fade away.
A state may also be asked to respect certain domains of legal
authority, perhaps most frequently in the domain of family law.
Minority communities often regulate the conditions of marriage, and
custody of children, as well as divorce, and request the legal
authority to do so. Respecting the legal authority of minority
communities to exercise jurisdiction in family law is the kind of
request that often troubles critics of cultural minority rights, since
it may entrench disadvantages to women, for example in divorce
settlements or custody agreements (Shachar 2001; Bakht 2007). In
general, then, states that acknowledge the legal authority of minority
communities in the space of family law also demand that those
who are participating in these adjudication proceedings do so
willingly; majority states therefore often retain permission for
themselves to interefere in these proceedings, in support of
those who may be inadequately protected. The state must attempt a
balance here, between offering its support to the most vulnerable
members of a minority group (for example to ensure that their
constitutional rights are protected) and interference of a kind that
is inattentive to the rightful claims of minority groups to persist
over time, in part by exercising its authority in key spaces.
Another common form of cultural preservation rights are
exclusion rights, that is, the right of a cultural group to
refuse to admit others to territory or membership, because of a worry
that more generous terms of admission threatens to undermine it by, in
effect, diluting it. Just as states have the putative right to control
their borders (discussed below in section 3), and who can claim
membership rights even after admission, so do some sub-state
jurisdictions claim this double right of exclusion, citing the
importance of cultural preservation. Indigenous communities have
sometimes claimed the right to exclude non-Indigenous individuals from
settling on their territories or the right to exclude others (for
example non-Indigenous spouses of Indigenous persons) from certain
membership benefits, including the right to vote (or otherwise have a
say) for those who will govern. State courts have been asked to
adjudicate the rightful authority of Indigenous communities to
make these determinations (see Song 2005).
The cultural preservation rights described above pose a difficult
challenge, connected to the critiques of treating culture as an
encompassing group: any claim for cultural preservation, say some
critics, translates in effect into problematic claims of control over
members, which, moreover, are typically most restrictive for women and
LGBTQ+ members of a cultural group. This is a challenge posed most
forcefully where rights of cultural preservation are demanded by
so-called illiberal groups like the Amish, and where they are (in the
eyes of critics) imposed on children against their will. Illiberal
groups are those which deny certain key liberal values, like autonomy
and equality; in many cases, these communities are supported by
educational systems that discourage autonomous choice-making, by
avoiding the teaching of skills and capacities that typically enable
it, and by enforcing hierarchical rules that elevate some members over
others in ways that egalitarians find uncomfortable. The worry is that
the community wants not only to preserve itself as a distinct cultural
group, but also that it wants to protect a kind of cultural
homogeneity that leaves no room for contestation or dissent over its
central values and practices. These latter hierarchical rules often
render women vulnerable to more powerful men, who may demand various
forms of sexual subservience to them, who relegate them to the home to
care for children, and who impose rigid codes of behaviour on them,
for which harsh penalties are meted out in cases of violation. These
kinds of so-called “cultural practices” are, for some
critics, such that they render any form of state support in protecting
minority cultural groups largely indefensible (Okin 1999). 
A worry that runs through objections to these many cultural
preservation rights is that women may not be willing
participants in these cultures, and therefore that respecting cultural
preservation rights consigns women to lives they would not
choose, do not want, and cannot escape. But for many it is a
mistake to assume that women members are such only under duress, since
many will deeply value the community itself and respect the norms and
values that it seeks to protect, even if they reject certain among
them. In these cases, and where political theorists consider them,
there is an attempt to move from treating culture in encompassing
terms towards treating it in dialogic and narrative terms. Cultures,
even oppressive (to liberals) minority cultures, are subject to
change, and perhaps the best source of change is deeply committed
members who willingly endorse key values but reject others, including
those that do not respect the equal rights of women. Monique
Deveaux’s account of female adult participants in customary
marriages in South Africa, who accept some elements of their culture,
but who aim to gain a voice at the table to shift others, treats
culture in dialogic terms (Deveaux 2007). Here, the key motivating
thought is that cultures can and do shift over time, in response to
how its members engage in it, and what matters is not the change
itself, but who or what is its source. On this view, the objective of
cultural preservation rights is not to preserve culture per
se, a challenge that would prove impossible in any case, but
rather the right to protect the ability of group members to shape
their culture and to protect it against unwelcome sources of
change.
Others argue that so long as women, and any others subject to rigid
cultural demands, possess a right (or the capacity) to exit the
community, their choice to remain should be treated as such (Kukathas
1992). For those who hold this view, efforts to render the right
to exit genuinely exercisable are tremendously
important (Kukathas 2012; Holzleithner 2012). In so doing, a
state must make a choice about the resources it provides to those
members who may desire to exit, but who do not have the means to
establish themselves in the larger society. In some orthodox religious
communities, property is owned in common and individual members do not
have any personal property or resources; as a result, exiters have
nothing on which to rely while they establish their new lives. In
others, members are poorly educated, and unfamiliar with life outside
of their own communities, and so exit without the capacity to sustain
themselves in the larger society.  So, receiving states can offer
support to exiters in various ways, for example by providing
shelters to exiting women (and men), in which education is provided so
that they may eventually attain self-sufficiency as a member of
mainstream society. The choice to support exiters may seem to
undermine a culture’s capacity for self-preservation. But
supporting exiters is not well-understood as denying cultural
preservation rights; rather, the choice to do so stems from a
state’s commitment to protecting the rights of all of its
members, including the most vulnerable, as best as it can do.
2.6 Rights against cultural loss
The right to cultural preservation described above should be
distinguished from the slightly different right against coerced
cultural loss, which focuses on preservation in cases where the
potential loss is the result of coercion by outside forces against
which a cultural group is relatively powerless. Of course, cultural
change is inevitable in some form, as highlighted above,
and especially if one holds a culture-as-dialogue view, cultures
are in fact never static. Rather, practices, norms, and
values that are defining of a culture at one time may cease to be
centrally defining of that culture, for a whole range of reasons
including economic, environmental, and political. So, in fact, some
amount of cultural loss is inevitable, and moreover, it is not
always to be regretted. Sometimes, it is a normal response to external
factors that are beyond a culture’s control, and sometimes it is
welcome because the changes result in the better protection of human
rights or more inclusive cultural traditions and practices. A
cultural group may choose to shift their central modes of production
in response to changing environmental factors, for example. So, as
Samuel Scheffler has argued, the strong preservationist view of
culture—that cultures should be insulated from all forms of
change—must be rejected (Scheffler 2007).
Yet, especially minority cultures may sometimes have a reasonable
claim that they are not able to protect themselves against unwanted
cultural change, or that they are not able to control the pace of
change. They may thereby be entitled to forms of state support, to
help them create the conditions under which they can resist unwanted
cultural change.  When linguistic minorities request state
support to persist in educating children in a minority language, for
example, sometimes the justification is in the name of protecting
against the erosion of the language in the face of pressure to adopt
or become fluent in the majority language.
In other cases, majorities are actively focused on undermining
minority cultures, often over years and even decades. Colonial states
have pursued genocidal policies against Indigenous communities for
example, with the expressed purpose of undermining their capacity to
survive as distinct peoples. In assessing cases of cultural loss,
then, a key factor is whether the shift is forced upon
minority groups, not necessarily by changing environmental or economic
conditions, but by agents who intend to undermine the culture,
by actively disvaluing it and thereby acting so as to
undermine the conditions for its robust continuity. External,
malicious, factors that engender cultural change that would not
otherwise be expected, make the change not only regrettable, but
generate a case for reparations, for example with respect to
Indigenous communities, where there is “evidence of a
history of dispossession, discrimination, or subordination”
(Phillips 2018: 97).
2.7 Cultural defense rights
In legal environments, wrong-doers sometimes deploy a cultural
defense, explaining that minority cultural norms and values, which are
in tension with those of the majority, are causally relevant in
explaining why they committed a wrong. A cultural defense has,
thereby, sometimes been treated as a relevant mitigating factor in
assigning punishment. The right to offer a cultural defense is
typically justified with respect to the importance of recognizing that
minorities do not always operate according to the same values and
norms that are represented in the majority’s legal system, and
that these differences are entitled to some consideration in legal
spaces. Earlier court decisions accepted explanations that, for
example, men who murdered their unfaithful partners were moved to do
so by a combination of shame and rage associated with cultural norms.
For example, men who claimed that “gang rape” (known
culturally as marriage by capture) was mandated by Hmong culture as a
way to secure a wife, in which women were not only complicit but in
fact willing partners, are no longer understood to have a defense in
legal suits accusing them of rape (Song 2005). However, the power of
“cultural” explanations in mainstream legal spaces has
decreased over time, as states have come to see how many of these
defenses are in fact cover for patriarchal, misogynist attitudes that
persist, both in some minority communities and in the wider
community.
“Cultural” defenses of crime often amount to treating
culture as though it were a homogeneous whole, and as though
perpetrators of crime rather than its victims have a lock on its
interpretation. But “respect for culture cannot mean deference
to whatever the established authorities of culture deem right”
(Gutmann 2003: 46). Additionally, a generic imperative to
“respect culture” in legal spaces can ignore the
differences among types of cultural expectations, which can range from
permissible acts, to encouraged acts and required acts, only some of
which may justifiably be treated as legally relevant (Vitikainen
2015: 162). As well, it can permit and encourage the
representation of minority (especially non-western) cultures as
stereotypes, and “mobilizes culture in ways that encourage
absurdly large generalizations about people from particular cultural
groups” (Phillips 2007: 81 & 99). The danger represented by
an uncritical acceptance of the cultural defense is in a treatment of
culture as so encompassing that it treats its members as incapable of
autonomous decision-making. But, say critics of the cultural defense,
this is a mistake—along with many other factors, culture can be
part of an explanation for engaging in wrong-doing, but should
“never be mistaken for the whole truth” (Phillips 2007:
98).
2.8 Exclusive cultural use rights (or rights against cultural appropriation)
A final cultural right that is claimed by some is the right to control
cultural artifacts or expressions, or the use of cultural content in
general (Matthes 2016). This is the right that is at issue in recent
controversies focused on cultural appropriation, defined as the use,
by a non-member, of “something of cultural value, usually a
symbol or a practice, to others” (Lenard & Balint 2020).
Familiar examples of actions that have been accused of engaging
in cultural appropriation include the wearing of dreadlocks by
whites; the donning of Indigenous clothing as Halloween costumes; the
use of turbans in high fashion; the teaching of yoga by instructors
who do not have South Asian backgrounds. In all of these cases, a
non-member is accused of “appropriating” a particular
cultural practice or symbol that is not their own. On this view,
cultures have exclusive rights to use their cultural
“products” as they see fit, often because that practice is
understood to be central to their identity. This perspective is
controversial, and often mocked, by those who observe that history
just is the mingling and sharing of cultural practices and symbols,
including in the spaces of cuisine, the arts, dress and spiritual
practices; their mocking treats the rights claim as relying on an
understanding of culture that is unchanging and immutable over time,
which is historically inaccurate and, furthermore, undesirable.
Correspondingly, key cultural artifacts are best understood as
belonging to “humanity”: “it isn’t peoples who
experience and value art: it’s men and women” (Appiah
2009).
The right claimed—to full or exclusive use of defining cultural
practices or symbols—is perhaps not best enforced by the state,
though states can and do engage in practices that are attentive to the
harms allegedly caused by cultural appropriation. For example,
centralized support for the arts, in the form of grants to produce
artistic endeavours, can be sensitive to who is asking for
support to produce what, and can direct funding towards
artists from a particular tradition who aim to produce culturally
specific products, and correspondingly refuse (unless very good reason
is offered) to support endeavours by cultural outsiders to produce
“insider” art (Rowell 1995; J. O. Young 2008). The right
claimed is relatively stronger where a particular cultural
community is the victim of a power imbalance, where the cultural
community has expressly requested that a particular practice or symbol
be “left alone” by a majority community, and where members
of the majority community are profiting on the basis of
its use of the particular symbol or practice (Lenard & Balint
2020). As in other cases, the right claimed by a cultural group is
strongest where there are persistent inequalities between the minority
claimant and the majority group.
3. Majority Cultural Rights Claims
Section 2 considered the cultural rights claims that are, usually,
made by minority groups. Majority groups make cultural claims as well,
in particular with respect to excluding others from their territory as
well as with respect to what can be demanded of those who are
admitted.
3.1 Cultural continuity and exclusion rights
One domain in which majority communities claim a cultural right is in
the space of immigration. For some, the right of states to shape their
culture can legitimately serve as a reason to exclude others, in
general and sometimes specific others. This view is often attributed
to Michael Walzer, who argues that the right of a state to control its
borders is intimately connected to its capacity to
defend the liberty and welfare, the politics and culture of a
group of people committed to one another and to their common life.
(Walzer 1983: 39, emphasis added)
The right of a state to control its culture is therefore an essential
one to protect its “collective consciousness”, as noted in
Section 1.
This claim has encountered pushback from many scholars, for multiple
reasons. One reason is that the claim that a state may exclude
would-be migrants for cultural reasons has too often been, in
fact, an attempt to enact discriminatory legislation aimed at
excluding migrants whose beliefs and practices are said to be
incompatible with, or even undermining of, the values and norms that
define the majority’s culture. Exclusion based on so-called
cultural reasons has often been a claim that a state prefers to remain
culturally, religiously, ethnically, and racially homogeneous.
Historically, states engaged explicitly in such discriminatory
practices, which have now been repudiated, including for example
variants of Asian Exclusion Acts which were in operation in North
America in the early 1900s.
The same accusation is also merited in several recent cases, such as
the implementation of the so-called Muslim Ban in the United States,
or with respect to proposals during the height of the crisis in Syria
(2015) in some countries to prioritize Christian over Muslim refugees
(Song 2018). Among political theorists of immigration, there is
however widespread repudiation of discriminatory immigration policies,
both explicitly and implicitly, even among those who defend the
general right of states to exclude would-be migrants and refugees, for
many reasons including to preserve culture (Miller 2005).
A second source of pushback stems from a more general skepticism that
a majority’s culture, even if genuinely valuable to its members,
should be treated as sufficiently so to warrant excluding migrants,
especially necessitous ones (the language of necessity is borrowed
from Song 2018). Even if it is conceded that culture is valuable to a
majority, many scholars believe that its protection cannot warrant
excluding those in severe need of safety or subsistence.
Yet, say those who defend the view that culture can, at least in some
cases, serve to exclude migrants, there is a case to be made for
treating the state as possessing the right to cultural continuity
(Miller 2005). This claimed right looks very much like the right to
cultural preservation (or against cultural loss) described above, and
it highlights not so much the sentimental dimensions of a
majority’s attachment to its culture, but rather its pragmatic
interpretation. On this view, any particular state is defined by a
“shared public culture” which, because shared, underpins
the trust that democratic states rely on to pursue political and
social objectives in common. No particular value that makes up a
shared public culture is valuable in and of itself. Rather, it is the
combination of a set of values, norms, and practices, that produces
“our” culture that is valuable, and in its presence, trust
is higher; as a result, so is the willingness to cooperate to support
policies that require some sacrifice, including for example,
commitment to redistributive social policies that are especially to
the benefit of those who are least well-off (e.g., see the essays in
Gustavsson & Miller 2019). So, according to those who defend these
views, a state that seeks to exert control over admission citing
“cultural” reasons is neither racist nor discriminatory,
but rather is seeking controlled admission (rather than closed
borders) so that newcomers can, over a sufficient time period, come to
adopt enough of the set of defining values, norms, and practices, to
be able to warrant and extend the trust that underpins the policies
that instantiate these objectively valued goods.
3.2 Cultural continuity and integration enforcement rights
States that defend the right of cultural continuity at the level of
admission to a state typically also deploy the right to adopt and
enforce “integration” policies that encourage newcomers to
adopt majority norms and values, arguing that the faster such
adoption happens, the more rapid admission itself can be. Integration
policies ask newcomers to adopt the norms and practices of the
majority community, whereas accommodation policies ask the majority to
accommodate practices that are distinct from those that define the
majority’s culture. On this conventional multicultural view, the
process by which migrants are admitted to the territory, and then to
membership, is a “two-way” street, requiring that both
newcomers and the host state adapt in response to each other (Kymlicka
1998).
Is the demand that newcomers integrate culturally reasonable?
Is it reasonable, that is, to ask immigrants to adopt the norms,
values, and practices that are central to the culture they have joined
(l will leave aside the question of economic and political
integration, here)? Notice that in the political and sociological
literature in immigration incorporation, integration (culturally) is
typically distinguished from assimilation, where the former focuses on
welcoming newcomers with the distinct sets of norms and values that
travel with them (and so accommodating them where possible), and the
latter demands that immigrants adopt as fully as possible the set of
norms and values that are central to the host society (Brubaker 2001;
see also Modood 2007). In the political theory literature on
multiculturalism, however, it is widely accepted that a demand for
full assimilation is normatively problematic (it requires too much of
immigrants, to abandon their histories and identities, as part of
joining a new community), but that some form of encouragement to
integrate is permissible.
Whether the integration demands are permissible depends on at least
two connected things, however: first, on the content of the shared
public culture and, second, on the accessibility of the venues in
which the content of this public culture is deliberated. The space in
which a culture is deliberated is amorphous as well as expansive. The
source of key norms, practices, and values is multi-fold: some are
historical, some are deliberately adopted through political processes,
some are accidentally adopted in response to contingent
circumstances. The demand that newcomers integrate, in the sense
of adopt the norms and practices of the majority culture to at least a
reasonable extent is more defensible in cases where access to spaces
in which they are deliberated is public and therefore open to
many voices. The precise meaning of “accessibility” to
spaces that are not clearly defined, and entry to which is not
monitored or policed in any formal way, is challenging to pin down.
But the key point is that to the extent that cultures welcome and take
seriously new voices—in public media, in political spaces, and
so on—they can be described as publicly accessible. So, there is
a connection between the legitimacy of demanding adherence to majority
culture norms and practices, as part of the process of integration,
and the genuine access that newcomers have to the spaces in which they
are deliberated.
In considering the second question, with respect to the content of a
majority’s shared public culture, I borrow from the literature
in the political theory of nationalism (though I do not believe that
the language of nationalism itself is essential to appreciate
its relevance to the discussion here). A culture can be defined by
features that are more or less inclusive. Where cultures are defined
by characteristics that are typically used to describe ethnic nations,
including shared history, religion, ethnicity/race, newcomers are less
easily able to join them and be recognized as full members. Where
cultures are defined by characteristics that are typically used, on
the other hand, to describe civic nations, including shared commitment
to political institutions and, usually, a commitment to liberal
democratic principles, then they are more welcoming for newcomers. In
the language adopted earlier in this entry, cultures that are defined
by exclusive features are more likely to treat culture as
encompassing, whereas cultures that adopt inclusive features, and
emphasize accessibility to the forums in which its content is
deliberated, treat culture in dialogic or identity terms. This need
not be the case, though, since those who treat culture in dialogic
terms may nevertheless believe that key elements of history or
religion are central to it (though they are open to deliberation about
the appropriateness of these elements as central) and similarly
identities can be formulated on the basis of exclusionary
features.
Another way to define inclusivity focuses attention on the extent to
which a culture’s main norms, practices, and values can be
adopted by newcomers without their giving up something they
value (Lenard 2019). Key here is to define the permissible contours of
an inclusive culture that, at the same time, can serve to distinguish
it from others in ways that resolve what philosophers have called the
“particularity” problem. If cultures are defined
only by commitment to liberal democratic principles and the
institutions that instantiate them, then a person will necessarily be
committed to any state that is so defined. But this conclusion does
not make sense of the reality that many citizens are attached to
their state’s interpretation of these
values—fundamental, abstract, liberal democratic
principles are adopted, respected, and instantiated, in other
words, in a culturally specific way. It is important, then, to
delineate the boundary of permissible cultural content, which can
include recognition of key historical moments, or political
conversations, or cultural icons. No state can demand of newcomers
that their emotional commitment be to their new state; but it can
reasonably impart information about learnable key cultural markers,
encourage newcomers to adopt the associated practices and norms, and
hope that over time their emotional identification shifts to the host
state, at least partially (Carens 2005). Under the condition that the
public cultural content of a host state is reasonably
accessible, and that the forums in which it is deliberated are
likewise reasonably accessible, then the host state can
permissibly encourage the integration of newcomers. This right is
perhaps best understood as derivative of the right to cultural
continuity that states claim in relation to immigration, which
can permissibly be claimed if and only if the accessibility
conditions described above are met.
Not all scholars agree on this point, of course, and some reject
entirely the suggestion that newcomers can be asked to make
accommodations to the culture of the state that they have joined.
Those who adopt variants on this view treat the majority’s
culture as nearly always homogeneous and oppressive in ways that are
disrespectful of newcomers, and treat the demand for integration along
at least some dimensions as “cleaned up” variations on the
discriminatory and racist immigration policies of the past (Abizadeh
2002). This is a real worry. When the Netherlands demanded that
potential migrants from majority Muslim countries watch a video and
pass a test merely to gain entry to its territory—a video that
showed gay men kissing and a topless woman—it was widely
excoriated for its discriminatory intent, rather than (as was claimed)
an attempt to ensure that migrants could adopt the liberal values that
supposedly characterized the country’s culture. More generally,
the mechanisms of encouraging the learning and adoption of the
majority culture’s values, in addition to its actual content as
delineated above, as well as the consequences for failure to do so,
must be scrutinized for their reasonableness. This assessment is a
tricky business, certainly, made trickier because in many (if not
most) immigration situations, the potential newcomer is in a situation
of vulnerability in relation to the host state: their interest in
gaining entry is very strong and so in many cases, they will accept
heavy-handed attempts to coerce their integration without
complaint.
4. Conclusion
Both minority groups (many of which are immigrant groups) and majority
groups claim that “culture” is important and deserving of
accommodation in multiple ways. This entry began with an examination
of the multiple ways in which culture has been understood, to unpack
the ways in which it is deployed when specific cultural rights are
claimed. It is important to notice that these cultural claims, on both
sides, are often made in relation to each other: a minority group
demands a particular cultural right and the majority responds by
claiming a different cultural right. In many cases, the choice to
respect or ignore claimed cultural rights is framed in terms of the
impact that doing so will have on the culture of the majority, for
example, by stating that a particular practice for which accommodation
is requested is incompatible with the majority culture in general, or
sometimes more specifically with a particular practice or norm that is
believed to be particularly important. The latter claim was made, for
example, in France, during “l’affaire du
foulard”—the right to cover one’s head as a
manifestation of Islamic (or Jewish) religious commitment was denied
for the way in which it compromised the French’s commitment to
laicity (Laborde 2008; Benhabib 2004).
This entry has attempted to offer the resources that are essential to
adjudicating these conflicts, in ways that take seriously both those
who demand cultural rights and those who resist respecting them.
Hopefully, future political theory can make use of this taxonomy to
identify satisfactory conclusions to these conflicts when they
arise.read more