Ajay Raina

Ajay Raina (PhD in Philosophy, 2023), A Critique of Differentiated Citizenship

This thesis is a critique of ‘liberal’ theories of culturally differentiated citizenship, with primary focus on Will Kymlicka’s philosophy. The main proposition of differentiated citizenship is that, for reasons of (distributive) justice, liberal states ought to give special rights to cultural minorities in addition to the universal, culture-blind, rights that all citizens have. The special cultural rights are essential for the members of ethnonational minority cultures to be able to exercise autonomy, for those communities to viably flourish, and for polyethnic, immigrant minorities to smoothly integrate into the liberal-democratic social contract. The classic liberal system of culture-blind universal rights and citizenship denies them these possibilities because the basic institutional structure of such a liberal society is, in reality, culturally majoritarian and minority exclusive; it cannot address substantive interests and needs of cultural minorities.

In this thesis, these claims of autonomy, wellbeing and integration are each posited as hypothesis and empirically tested – for the first time against large-N, longitudinal data – in the real liberal world where such special rights have been granted. The evidence suggests that none of these claims can be undisputedly upheld. Deeper analysis points to faulty assumptions in the theories being the likely cause of the empirical failures. For example, while the argument for the autonomy rests on the assumption that ‘societal culture’ is the source of all the meaningful ‘options’ of the good life, it overlooks the role that ‘preferences,’ the agent’s dispositions to options, play in the actual making of choice and the culture’s role, if any, in the shaping of those dispositions. Similarly, the wellbeing of the Native ethnocultural minorities is assumed to automatically follow from the ‘external protections’ – from ‘outbid’ (on resources) and ‘outvote’ (on policies) disadvantages which the classically liberal economic and political institutions supposedly cause them – that the special cultural right to self-government provide them, with little thought given to the structure and diversity of institutions which, economic theory tells us, are factors more critical to the achievement of robust wellbeing than bare ownership of resources and policy. Similarly, the assumption that multicultural rights, simplicter, enable shared civic identity of ‘mutual concern, accommodation, or sacrifice’ is problematic because it conflates independent dimensions of political life. Rights establish/adjudicate the moral status of members in a moral community, while ‘mutual concern, accommodation, or sacrifice’ represent actions subject to moral responsibility adjudication by, or within, the moral community; neither dimension, straightforwardly, entails the other.

On the positive side, this thesis proposes and defends a principle, the baseline principle (BP), of effective distributive justice: a liberal state ought to ensure equal probability of securing the acceptable baseline of wellbeing for all citizens. The baseline principle can be (prescriptively) fleshed out as the equal capabilities principle (ECC): all citizens should have equal sum of basic capabilities needed to satisfy the BP in a market economy. (The ECC should also, hopefully, reduce the autonomy deficit in the culture group). The ECC does require some state paternalism, but, arguably, only of a degree that would be acceptable to all rational and reasonable persons. And, shared civic identity in the multicultural context, this thesis argues, has better chance of emerging, inductively, from ‘identity of political experience’ rather than deductively from dissimilarity of political rights.

Supervisors: Associate Professor François Schroeter, Associate Professor Dan Halliday