Travelling Concepts: Negotiating Diversity in Canada and Europe

Christian Lammert · Katja Sarkowsky (Eds.) Travelling Concepts

Politikwissenschaftliche Paperbacks Studien und Texte zu den politischen Problemfeldern und Wandlungstendenzen westlicher Industriegesellschaften

Band 41 Herausgegeben von Dieter Nohlen Rainer-Olaf Schultze Wichard Woyke

Christian Lammert Katja Sarkowsky (Eds.)

Travelling Concepts Negotiating Diversity in Canada and Europe

With a Foreword by Bhikhu Parekh

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Gedruckt mit Unterstützung der Gesellschaft für Kanada Studien (GKS), der Kanadischen Regierung und der Dr. Bodo Sponholtz-Stiftung.

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Acknowledgements

The preparation of this book was made possible by the contribution of a number of people and institutions we would like to thank. This collection of essays is to a large extent the outcome of discussions begun with the organisation of the conference “Negotiating Diversity: Transatlantic Exchanges between Canada and Europe” which took place at the Center for North American Studies (ZENAF) at Goethe-University of Frankfurt in April 2007. And although this book does not in any strict sense document this conference, many of the articles are reworked contributions or essays written in the aftermath and with reference to this conference and the debates it opened up. We thus would first like to thank a number of people and in institutions that made this conference a success: the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Canadian Embassy, and the Center for North American Studies for funding this event. Our heartfelt thanks for their active support in organizing the conference, for their good humour in face of adversities and spontaneous rescheduling, and thus also for their patience go to Christa Buschendorf, Rainer Forst, Astrid Franke, Nicole Hirschfelder, Ulrike Klinger, Kim Kohlmeyer, Gunther Müller, Nicola Nowak, Martin Saar, Marie-Christine Sawires, Christoph M. Schmidt, Alexandra Schuler, Frank Schulze-Engler, Niels Rabe, Martin Thunert, and Ursula Wohlmann. In the specific context of this essay collection we gratefully acknowledge the generous support by the Association for Canadian Studies (GKS), the Dr. Bodo Sponholtz-Stiftung (which also co-sponsored the above mentioned conference), and the Institute for Canadian Studies at the University of Augsburg. In particular, we would like to thank Rainer-Olaf Schultze and Martin Thunert for getting the publication under way; special thanks go to Katrin Emmerich from the VS-Verlag for her patient pragmatism and to Lisa Jank for her diligent and uncomplaining assistance during the copy-editing process. Last but not least, the editors would like to thank the contributors for their productive collaboration during a sometimes tedious und uncertain publication process. Christian Lammert, Katja Sarkowsky, Frankfurt, August 2009

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Content of the Book

Bhikhu Parekh: Foreword………………………………………….……………9 Christian Lammert and Katja Sarkowsky: Travelling Concepts: Negotiating Diversity in Canada and Europe……………………….…13

I. Negotiating Diversity in the Canadian Context

I.1 Theoretical Concepts of Inclusion and Exclusion Pierre Anctil: L’accommodement raisonnable dans le contexte légal canadien: mécanisme de gestion de la diversité ou source de tensions………………………………………………………….…27 Ingrid Makus: Reasoning about “Reasonable Accomodation”: Charles Taylor on Negotiating Diversity in Canada and Quebec …….47 Suzanne Gallant: “At the Mercy of Putative Majority”: Difference as a ‘Problem’ in Canadian Political Theory……….……………………...63 Andreas Krebs: Multiculturalism and Colonial Continuity.…....……………....83

I.2 Diversity in Canadian Society and Literature Simon Langlois: Defining the Quebec Nation: Ten Years of Debates and an Emerging Consensus.………………………………………..109 Julie Spergel: Negotiating Diversity and Diaspora: Planting Chava Rosenfarb’s Tree of Life in a Canadian Context………….………….129 Larissa Lai: Labour Asian Can: Grammar, Movement and the Institution…...153

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II. Travelling Concepts: Back and forth across the Atlantic

II.1 Comparing Canada and Europe Jiri S. Melich: Multiculturalism and Integration: Lessons to Be Learnt from Cases of Canada and Europe ……..………………...169 Robert Sata: Multinational Pluralism – Rethinking Multiculturalism as an Approach to Diversity and Cultural Difference……………….193 Allan Craigie: New Lessons for (and from) the Old World: A study of the politicisation of regional identity in Nova Scotia & North East England..……………….………………..211

II.2 Circulating Ideas in a Globalized and Transnational Context Dirk Hoerder: Rediscovering Migration and Cultural Interaction in the ‘Old World’: Canadian Research Approaches Reach Europe……….233 Katrin Urschel: Towards diversity within ethnic majorities: Deconstructing the ‘Anglo-Celt’…………….……………………….251 Daniel Drache: The Worried Global Public and New Citizenship Practices in an Unheroic Age……………………………...................271

References…………………………………………………………………….293 Notes on the contributors and editors………………………………………311

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Foreword Bhikhu Parekh

As creative and reflective agents, human beings seek meaning in their lives, and develop more or less coherent views of the world or cultures in terms of which to organize their personal and collective lives. When different groups of individuals within the same society subscribe to different ways of thought, they face the crucial question of how to deal with their cultural diversity and sustain a shared common life. Premodern societies took a relatively relaxed view of diversity and generally opted for a looser union. Modernity brought with it a very different approach to the subject. This is reflected in, among other things, the institution of the modern state, especially the liberal democracy which represents one way of constituting it. Liberal democracy has exercised a decisive influence on our political and moral imagination for the past three centuries. Unlike premodern societies which took the community as their starting point and defined the individual in terms of it, it takes the individual as the ultimate and irreducible unit of, and thus conceptually and ontologically prior to society. The latter is taken to consist of individuals, and refers to the totality of its members and their formal and informal relationships. Individual are the sole and equal sources of moral claims, and social and political institutions are judged in terms of their ability to safeguard and promote individual interests. The liberal democratic state represents a homogeneous legal space within which its citizens move freely and enjoy an identical basket of basic rights. They might belong to different ethnic, religious, linguistic and other communities, but the state takes no official cognizance of them and grants them no official status. The state transcends them all and represents an independent realm of its own. Its members are expected to identify with it and acquire the unitary, undivided and highly privileged political identity of citizenship. The political identity is articulated in terms of shared institutions and values. All citizens are expected to subscribe to these, and in so doing constitute a single ‘demos’ or people. Some versions of secularism, rationalism, individualism, etc. constitute the central features of the liberal way of life, and define its cultural identity. The state embodies it in its legal, political, economic, educational and other institutions and seeks to mould its citizens appropriately. This involves a silent or open, passive or aggressive, war on the prevailing forms of organised cultural diversity, and natu9

rally a considerable amount of violence. As the history of every modern state shows, individuals of the liberal imagination are not given by nature. They have to be created by ‘liberating’ them from and destroying the various cultural communities in which they are necessarily embedded. The liberal democratic historical project has come under considerable strain in recent years. Cultural diversity has increased because of the breakdown in the traditional moral consensus, immigration and globalization. Unlike a culturally homogeneous society where culture is taken for granted and often not even noticed, cultural diversity heightens the consciousness of culture and gives it considerable importance in defining one’s personal and social identity. Cultural diversity has also become more assertive. Long-suppressed groups assert their identity and demand equal recognition and treatment. The linkage between culture and domination, and the role of culture in legitimizing and enforcing an unequal power relationship, is being increasingly acknowledged. Territorially concentrated cultural communities demand political autonomy as a necessary vehicle of self-expression. In the aftermath of colonialism and the Nazi genocide, there is also a greater appreciation of the need to recognize and respect the rights of cultural minorities. Thanks to all this, cultural diversity has today acquired unprecedented historical importance, and challenges many of the central assumptions of liberal democracy and even the modern state. The challenge arose and was and is being met differently in different societies. Although Canada was not the first to face it, it was the first to be confronted by the full force of cultural diversity. Its cultural diversity sprang from three different sources, namely, the indigenous peoples, Quebec, and immigrants, and its multiculturalism was intended as a policy response to them. Multiculturalism in Canada was a way of promoting national integration by respecting legitimate group differences within a broadly agreed framework of rights. It largely addressed the demands of immigrants, and was contested and suitably redefined to accommodate the demands of other two groups. Although the asymmetrical federation did not entirely satisfy Quebec, it provided the basis for political negotiation. Thanks to the considerable popularity of its experiment, and the imaginative ways in which its talented political philosophers have theorized it and suitably broadened the traditional conceptions of the state and liberal democracy, the Canadian discourse on multiculturalism influenced its counterparts in Europe. Unlike Canada, European societies do not have to deal with indigenous peoples. Some of them do have territorially concentrated cultural minorities, but hardly any of these has the foundational status and the distinct linguistic identity of Quebec. Since immigrants are the main source of cultural diversity, the range of diversity in Europe is narrower than in Canada. Even so far as the immigrants 10

are concerned, they are in many cases ex-colonial subjects, which makes their diversity both easier and more difficult to deal with: the former because immigrants already know something about the dominant culture of their new society, and many have even been shaped by it; the latter because they had long been subjected to negative cultural stereotypes and bring with them their own historical memories of colonial rule. European societies have a strong tradition of nation state, which bases the unity of the state on a shared thick culture. Since they saw cultural diversity as a threat to their unity and identity, they initially embarked on a policy of assimilation, which predictably provoked considerable resistance. While they have reluctantly opted for a looser form of integration and some version of Canadian multiculturalism, their conversion remains tentative, fragile, and vulnerable to a considerable moral panic at the slightest provocation, as has happened in recent years in the U.K., France, the Netherlands and Germany. When the language of cultural diversity and multiculturalism travelled outside the West, it underwent further changes. Take India where it enjoys considerable vague. India has no immigrants to deal with. Its cultural diversity is largely religious and ethnic, raising the question of how to integrate its religious and ethnic minorities. The former has led to a debate on secularism, defined by some as state indifference to religion and by others as equal respect for all religions. As for the ethnic diversity, the country has taken a relaxed view of it and opted for an asymmetrical federation, broadly similar to the Canadian but without its acrimony. Although the term ‘multicultural’ is frequently used to describe India’s diversity, it is widely felt to be too general and west-centred to capture the depth and specificity of its cultural reality. By and large Indians use it a handy umbrella term under which to subsume, separate and debate their different types of diversity. These and other discourses on multiculturalism are marked by both similarities and differences. The similarities consist in the fact that they all wrestle with such questions as how to conceptualise and relate different types of cultural diversity, how to delimit the range of permissible diversity, how to arrive at the principles required for the purpose, the relation between the state and culture, and the division of powers between the centre and the constituent units. The differences in the discourses arise from the differences in the nature and origins of the preventing forms of cultural diversity, cultural attitudes to differences, historical traditions, past experiences, and so on. Similarities encourage mutual borrowing, differences lead each to go its own way. In the light of our brief discussion, concepts travel across societies, and stand in a dialectical relationship with them. Like a pair of glasses they lead people to define their social world in a certain way, which is often both illumi11

nating and distorting. Equally they undergo changes under the pressure of the recalcitrant social reality, are brought into contact with and redefined in the light of the concepts and assumptions derived from the local tradition, and acquire a new descriptive and prescriptive dimension. Insofar as they retain formal continuity, they make a dialogue between different discourses possible. Insofar as they are transformed, they make the dialogue both difficult and necessary. The excellent essays in this volume explore this process from different angles and in different contexts. They show how the ideas of cultural diversity and multiculturalism are defined, contested and negotiated and give rise to distinct traditions of discourse in Canada and Europe. The essays insightfully compare these traditions and explore their internal tensions and ambiguities. They show too that cultural diversity throws up a whole host of questions that are too large and complex to be discussed from within a single disciplinary perspective. The insights and sensibilities of moral and political theory, history, sociology and literary studies need to be brought into a creative interplay, and the essays examine how this can be done. Some disciplines are intensely sensitive to cultural diversity. Some others such as economics and philosophy prefer to operate at a level where cultural diversity is invisible or appears irrelevant, and they need to be reminded of the epistemological price they pay. This fascinating volume shows that in travelling across geographical and disciplinary boundaries, concepts and the theories they embody reflect both their cosmopolitan reach and vernacular origins.

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Travelling Concepts: Negotiating Diversity in Canada and Europe Christian Lammert and Katja Sarkowsky

‘Diversity,’ denoting cultural and ethnic, but also socio-economic differentiation and increasingly stratification, has become a keyword in both the social sciences and cultural studies. In political theory and the social sciences in general, ‘diversity’ provides a framework in which to discuss issues of multiculturalism, migration, sub-state nationalism, indigenous people, and questions of citizenship and citizenship rights; equally important in cultural and literary studies, if with different foci and often with recourse to the related terminology of ‘difference,’ ‘diversity’ claims theoretical and analytical currency with regard to constructions of identity, the canon, and understandings of ‘ethnic,’ ‘multicultural,’ or ‘postcolonial’ literatures and cultures. Since the 1980s, both fields, the social sciences and cultural and literary studies, have been marked by significant shifts in what ‘diversity’ means, in which contexts, and to what effects. The same is obvious for the way in which western democratic nations address changing demographics and increasing cultural diversity within their borders; in North America but also to a growing extent in Europe, concepts of homogenous nations have given way to an understanding of cultural diversity as a constitutive aspect of contemporary societies, and thus to policies that grant rights to ethnic and other cultural minorities as minorities. But, as Will Kymlicka notes in his recent Multicultural Odysseys, not only have individual nation states begun to replace earlier assimilationist or integrationist policies with multicultural approaches that seek to preserve and protect cultural difference; also, this shift has an increasingly international dimension on two levels, “the global diffusion of the political discourse of multiculturalism” and “the codification of multiculturalism in certain international legal (or quasi-legal) norms.”1 Whereas Kymlicka’s book is concerned mainly with the second level of codification, this collection of essays presents an investigation of the transnational diffusion of the political discourse of diversity and multiculturalism. The contributions concentrate on a very specific context: the way in which concepts of diversity ‘travel’ between the disciplines; and across the Atlantic, more specifically, be1

Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys. Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3-4.

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tween Canada and Europe. Also, in a second step, this collection is concerned with the ways in which these ‘travels’ have to be contextualized in changing public arenas as part of transnationalization and globalization processes, the structuring of these arenas by a multiplicity of actors, and the role of these publics as spaces in which concepts of identity and diversity are discussed and mutually recognized. In short, this collection builds on the assumption that concepts of diversity travel and that they are negotiated on various levels to be adaptable to the specific contexts in and between which they travel; the geographical frameworks this collection focuses on is provided by the exchange between Canada and Europe. Travelling Concepts ‘Concepts,’ as cultural critic Mieke Bal has it, offer miniature theories;2 they allow and force us to focus not only our attention but also our scholarly interest in the strong Habermasian sense of the term.3 They are “the sites of debate, awareness of difference, and tentative exchange,” the basis for both meaningful agreement and, maybe even more importantly, disagreement.4 As such, concepts are not fixed; rather, “they travel – between disciplines, between individual scholars, between historical periods, and between geographically dispersed academic communities.”5 With Bal and others, we adopt the metaphor of ‘travel’ in order to attempt and capture the ways in which concepts, that is, miniature theories, are adapted and adopted into different frameworks of analysis, and how they are transformed in this process. Firstly, these frameworks are disciplinary. While inter- and transdisciplinarity have become central modes of exchange in theory, in practice there remains much to be desired in terms of cooperation between scholars in the social sciences and the humanities. This collection brings together established and younger scholars from political sciences, sociology, history, and literary and cultural studies in order to investigate ‘diversity’ – both as a concept for and an object of study in various disciplines; while some of the contributions sketch the actual journey of the concept in question as well as related ones (e.g. Hoerder, Urschel), others critically examine its currency and problems in specific contexts. These contexts go beyond the disciplines, but also cross borders of a dif2

Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 22. 3 Ibid. 12; see also Jürgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973). 4 Bal 13. 5 Ibid. 24.

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ferent kind. So secondly, the different frameworks this collection seeks to highlight are also to be understood in geographical terms, encompassing on the one hand the Canadian context, on the other various European countries. These geographical contexts are doubly targeted: as contexts in which ‘diversity’ is a political, cultural, and social reality and is looked at as an object of investigation and study for scholars of various disciplines; and as contexts that shape the way in which scholars look at and construct their object of study, that is, as a concept to capture social and cultural processes of transformation, tension, and opportunity. Negotiating Diversity Therefore, we seek to capture the crucial political and cultural processes at the centre of this collection with the term ‘negotiation.’ ‘Negotiation’ stresses the aspect of dialogue and conversation, it can be understood as “a bargaining to reach an agreement” or even as an “intervention” (Webster’s dictionary) and appropriately denotes the processes of struggle not only about how to ‘deal’ with social and cultural diversity, but also over the very meaning of diversity and difference. Central to this struggle is what Charles Taylor has introduced as the concept of recognition, not just as a way of reaching an agreement about difference, but as an essential part of identity building. Taylor assumes that identity formation is possible only in and through social relations of recognition. As he puts it in his influential and controversial essay “The Politics of Recognition,” our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognitions of others, and so a person or a group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm; can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, 6 distorted, and reduced mode of being.

Building on an often critical examination of Taylors concept of recognition as a way to negotiate identity and acknowledge difference, the arguments put forward in this anthology are not so much guided by the quest of the best way to accommodate cultural diversity in a particular society, but on the process of negoti-

6

Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25-73. 25.

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ation itself and how different contexts and changing public arenas affect these debates about diversity and culture. In this context, ‘culture’ is understood not as encompassing specific essences but as “units of meaning and meaningful forms” as well as the practices that create, perpetuate, or question meaning;7 thus, cultures are always born out of interaction with others and are shaped by wider economic, political, social, and other forces. Human beings, as Bhikhu Parekh has it, are ‘culturally embedded’, and different cultures “define and constitute human beings and come to terms with the basic problems of human life in their own different ways.”8 The understanding of culture as constant re/production and meaningful practices then suggests that “every culture is internally plural and differentiated,”9 and at the same time, membership allows for differing levels of attachment to a culture, for deep disagreement over what attachment entails, and for a cultural identity to be fluid and contested.10 So the respective concepts of ‘culture’ and ‘cultural identity’ are subject of constant inter- and intra-group negotiations and changes across time and place. Following Parekh, we define diversity in the context of this collection as ‘cultural differences.’11 Nevertheless, in recent years cultural studies and critical race studies have put a strong emphasis on the ways in which cultural and ethnic categories intersect with other categories of identification as well as of marginalization, such as gender, sexuality, or class. So this collection is structured along the lines of cultural diversity as a central focus – not because we think these other categories unimportant but because we felt that a more comprehensive approach to the concept of ‘diversity’ would have gone far beyond the scope of one collection –, individual contributions indeed highlight intersectionality (Larissa Lai and Suzanne Gallant in particular, to some extent Andreas Krebs); they thus provide an idea of the potential ramifications and the questions that they pose to conceptualizing diversity, to diversity as a ‘travelling’ concept, and to the ways in which they impact political practice. Taking the theories formulated by Charles Taylor, Will Kymlicka and Bhikhu Parekh as a framework, the essays in this collection investigate contextsensitive understandings of diversity while at the same time subjecting them to critical de- and reconstruction. A central term in this regard is ‘multiculturalism’ perceived as a concept that might vary from very generally referring to cultural 7

Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections. Culture, People, Places (London: Routledge, 1996), 19. Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism. Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 122. 9 Ibid. 338. 10 Ibid. 148. 11 Ibid. 3. 8

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diversity or cultural embedded differences via ways of granting minority rights and giving some groups a ‘special status’ to a differentiated concept of citizenship. Kymlicka identifies three stages in the philosophical debate about minority rights. First, minority rights as a communitarian defence against the encroachment of liberalism, Kymlicka calls this the ‘pre-1989 debate.’12 Recent discussions regarding the role of culture and identity within liberalism lead to the second stage: whether people’s interest in their culture and identity is sufficient to justify departing from the norm of ethno-cultural neutrality, by supplementing common individual rights within minority rights. The problem here is: liberal democracies did not and do not in fact abide by any norm of ethno-cultural neutrality and this results in a third stage, to a view of minority rights not as a deviation from ethno-cultural neutrality, but as a response to majoritarian nationbuilding. A good example for this in the Canadian context is the situation of Quebec. Charles Taylor has developed his ideas on recognition primarily by looking at the underlying conflict between Quebec and the ‘Rest of Canada’ in part as a conflict between two concepts of liberalism – procedural and substantive liberalism (see Ingrid Makus’ essay in this collection). In the procedural version of liberalism, the Canadian state is assumed to be neutral on substantive issues, individual rights are more important than collective goals and constitutionally embedded rules ensure that individuals are treated in a fair and equal way. Substantive liberalism on the other hand means that the state is willing and expected to take a stance on questions of a ‘good life.’ Some individual rights seem to be less important than others and it is within limits legitimate to infringe on those rights for the sake of the substantive ends in form of collective goals. According to Taylor, the substantive mode of liberalism is dominant in Quebec, whereas with the introduction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 Canada has moved clearly toward the procedural model of liberalism. Taylor suggest that the dilemma between the two modes of liberalism coexisting, may be resolved in a model of liberalism that is substantive as well as procedural, combining commitment to a particular conception of the good with the protection of minority rights. Canada and Europe Canada as a starting point for analysing ways of negotiating diversity seems selfevident not just because of the multicultural reality of Canada as an immigrant 12

Kymlicka 2007, 27-28.

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society, but because Canada was the first country that introduced an official policy of multiculturalism, a policy introduced by the federal government in 1971, which acknowledges that many ‘ethnic’ Canadians experience unequal access to resources and opportunities. It urges more recognition of the contributions of all Canadians, regardless of their ethnic background, the preservation of certain expressions of their ethnicity, and more equality in the treatment of all Canadians. Furthermore, as already indicated, there is a rich theoretical debate – mainly based on the works of Taylor and Kymlicka – that has emerged within Canada and that reflects on questions of multiculturalism and the democratic negotiations of difference. Taylor’s “Politics of Recognition” as well as Kymlicka’s Liberalism, Community, and Culture13 are mainly based on Canadian experiences and difficulties in dealing with multicultural realities in the Canadian society. Increasingly, the theoretical concepts and ideas that where developed against the background of the Canadian experiences have come to serve as a reference point in the debate on diversity in the European context with regard to the process of further European integration; the question of how to build a ‘Union of Diversity;’14 and the different experiences of countries in western and especially in eastern Europe with migration and ethnic-nationalist movements. As a result of different historical settings and different patterns of migration in Europe and Canada, political awareness of diversity and approaches to the accommodation of cultural difference vary widely. The shifting meanings of ‘multiculturalism’ are instructive in this context: a government policy, a political ideology as well as an ideal of cultural pluralism,15 and a ‘cover-all’ term to designate the ‘social reality’ of an ethnically diverse society. Both in Canada and in Europe, the term can be and is deployed in all of these meanings. In Canada, the term began circulating successfully as a result of the work done by the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in the 1960s, the ensuing politics of multiculturalism implemented by Pierre Trudeau in 1971, and the Multiculturalism Act in 1988; in Europe, at least with regard to its meaning as a government policy to accommodate cultural difference, the term gained momentum only in the late 1980s. As Will Kymlicka has argued, it was the end of the Cold War and the ensuing break-up of the multi-ethnic former Communist countries that put multiculturalism on the European agenda; and it did so not 13

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Taylor 1994; Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Peter Kraus, A Union of Diversity. Language, Identity and Polity-Building in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Linda Hutcheon, “Introduction,” in Other Solitudes. Canadian Multicultural Fictions, eds. Linda Hutcheon and Marion Richmond (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990), 1-16. 2.

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only with regard to these nations in process of fundamental reorganization, but also within the context of western democracies, where until then established minority rights had primarily concerned national minorities (such as the Swedes in Finland) or indigenous populations (e.g. the Sami in Scandinavia or Greenlanders).16 The adoption of the term after 1989, central in the context of interest here, often happened with direct reference to Canadian experiences. Even then, however, compared to Canada, the term was used rather to describe the changed socio-cultural realities than as a comprehensive political strategy or societal model (see Melich in this collection). Obviously, when comparing Canada and Europe, not only the time frame of successful circulation but also the constellations of cultural diversity and the ways in which this diversity is accommodated and recognized on different societal levels vary significantly. In Canadian multicultural policies, three major groupings and hence also dimensions of diversity are central for the debates: indigenous people, the so-called founding nations (francophones and anglophones), and immigrants.17 All three dimensions are part of state- and nationbuilding processes in Canada, and all three had important institutional consequences. Also, Canada (as the United States and Australia) has increasingly seen the emergence of critical multiculturalism, that is the charge against statemanaged multiculturalism as reifying and exoticising as well as domesticating cultural difference.18 In the European context, e.g. in Germany and France, the issue of cultural diversity has come to focus on questions of religion19 mandatory language instruction, or debates about Leitkultur vs. ‘cultural fragmentation.’ However, a common denominator of these different contexts clearly is a multicultural reality, that is, societal set-ups constituted by culturally diverse groups and the need to have this diversity recognized – individually, collectively, and institutionally. In the past ten years or so, European nations have increasingly looked to Canada for potential models to accommodate diversity socially, politically, culturally, and philosophically. The ‘travels’ of the concept central to this collection, ‘diversity,’ have altered the concept – and these travels, so our assumption, are not monodirectional but embedded in contexts of by now multi-

16

See Kymlicka 2007, 173, 177. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 22-24. 18 David Bennett, “Introduction,” in Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity, ed. David Bennett (London: Routledge, 1998), 1-26. 4; in this collection, see e.g. the contributions by Suzanne Gallant, Larissa Lai, and Andreas Krebs. 19 For example as in questions regarding religious instruction at public schools in Germany or the ‘scarf affairs’, targeting the relationship between state and religion as well as between public and private spheres; see Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others. Aliens, Residents, and Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 183-202. 17

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centred constellations of exchange. It is this opening towards transnational frameworks that we seek to sketch through the structure of this collection. Outline of the Book Therefore, leading questions of Negotiating Diversity are: How do disciplinary, theoretical, political contexts shape concepts and how do they (have to) change when being translated into other frameworks, for instance from Canada to Europe? What underlying ideas of nation, identity, community, difference shape these formulations and transformations? How are these shifts reflected in categories, policies, and institutions? This collection is structured to increasingly open up the focus of these questions and thus to some extent follows the move that works such as Will Kymlicka’s have undergone in recent years; starting from the Canadian context, it continues to a comparative Canadian-European framework and finally to transnational and potentially global constellations. The first section of the book, “Negotiating Diversity in the Canadian Context,” concentrates on how concepts of diversity are negotiated in multicultural Canada. The first sub-section, “Theoretical Concepts of Inclusion and Exclusion,” targets the theoretical basis of Canadian multiculturalism and rests primarily on a critical engagement with the works of Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka. Pierre Anctil (University of Ottawa) in his opening essay, takes the human rights legislation in Canada as a starting point and defines it as a product of a long history of negotiation between the two founding communities of the Canadian state, from colonial traditions to changing immigration policies and the radical transformation since the 1960s. Anctil discusses the consequences of this transformation and of the ensuing new approaches on current definitions of multiculturalism and on how the issue of diversity is addressed in Canadian society more generally. Ingrid Makus (Brock University) looks at Charles Taylor’s concept of ‘recognition’ as a way of negotiating diversity. Focussing on Taylor’s distinction between procedural and substantive liberalism, Makus analyses the Supreme Court decision on Quebec secession (1998) and the recent recommendations and underlying consumptions of the Taylor-Bouchard-Report on minorities in Quebec in order to understand whether demands for recognition can be met, satisfied, or even addressed through procedural means such as constitutional issues. Suzanne Gallant’s (Johns Hopkins University) essay then critically examines what she regards as the common basis of Charles Taylor’s and Will Kymlicka’s word. Both, so Gallant, share a framework in which diversity and difference are primarily viewed as problems to be solved and in which the categories of acceptable difference have become too static. In face of the density of con20

temporary culture and the hybridity of identities, argues Gallant, this normative assumption of society needs to be challenged in order to develop are decentred understanding of diversity and pluralism. Finally, following up on some of the issues raised by the previous contributions, Andreas Krebs (University of Ottawa) argues against the general assumption that the politics of multiculturalism in Canada constitute a clear break from colonial mentality. Analysing the concept of disgust as a culturally coded form of moral judgement without the need for conscious reflection, he argues that “the politics of recognition allows diversity a functional role in the body politic, but only after the stench of difference has been hosed off”. Recognition depends of predefined parameters of difference; ‘disgust’ here serves both as an illustration of a scripted encounter with the other and as an example for culturally coded affects. The second subsection of this first part, “Diversity in Canadian Society and Literature,” looks more closely at manifestations of diversity in Canadian society and social and cultural debates. Simon Langlois (Laval University) in his essay focuses on the ways in which Quebec defines itself as a nation. Taking the fact of permanent social and cultural changes as a vantage point, Langlois discusses the necessary and constant ‘refoundation’ of the nation in Quebec as well as in Canada. Central dimensions of these refounding processes in Quebec, argues Langlois, are language and territory. Julie Spergel (University of Regensburg) takes the translation of Chava Rosenfarb’s Tree of Life, a novel about the Lodz ghetto, from Yiddish into English as the starting point for investigation of the relationship between diaspora, multiculturalism, and Canadian national literature. Sketching an analogy between Canadian multiculturalism and the book’s agenda, Spergel contends that Tree of Life “[mirrors] what should be the goal of Canadian literature” calls for an inclusion of the book as ‘Canadian,’ a reminder to see ‘CanLit’ as encompassing transnational stories as constitutive part of ‘Canadian identity,’ pushing multiculturalism to effectively embrace a concept of hybrid identities and border-crossing subject constructions. Tackling the issue of multiculturalism from a more critical angle, Larissa Lai in her contribution looks at the entry of Asian Canadian Studies and Asian Canadian literature into the academy; the constellation she investigates in one in which a term, that has historically served to marginalize and oppress a group thus marked is now being instrumental to empowerment. Lai critical assessment as both an academic and a writer runs along different axes: firstly, she looks at work done from within the academy, particularly with regard to the often-held view of the institutionalization of Asian Canadian Studies as a “protracted birth” in comparison to that of Asian American Studies; secondly, she relates this discussion to the activist and artistic work being done outside the academy, specifically in the early 1990s as a crucial historical moment for the emergence of Asian Canadian art, literature, 21

and academic studies, and the potential blurring or at least complication of boundaries between these fields. Lai grounds her discussion in a ‘double location’: a critical investigation of local and a terminological mobility across (national and institutional) borders. The second section of the book, entitled “Travelling concepts: back and forth across the Atlantic,” on the basis of the critical evaluations of Canadian multiculturalism provided in the first section foregrounds the exchange of concepts of cultural and societal diversity between Canada and European countries; in a second step, it analyses the ways in which concepts and ideas circulate between different regions and globally and how the public as an arena to negotiate diversity changes as a result of the processes of transnationalization. Part one in this section turns more directly to the comparison between Canada and Europe. Jiri Melich (University of Izmir) in his essay looks at different forms of multicultural policies in Canada and Europe. Starting with an investigation on the implementation of multicultural policies in Canada, Melich analyses the differences between Europeans and Canadians in coping with multicultural coexistence as a fact of life. This leads to interrelated questions of how much cultural diversity can be managed and how multicultural policies can contribute to a peaceful integration of national society. Robert Sata (Central European University) introduces the concept of ‘multinational pluralism’ to rethink multiculturalism as an approach to diversity and cultural difference. By looking for a liberal justification of multiculturalism, Sata’s concept seeks to integrate multicultural and egalitarian liberalism. ‘Multinational Pluralism’ understood as an attempt to bring together nationalism with liberalism is according to Sata a combination of egalitarian liberalism and multicultural recognition. Allan Craigie (University of Edinburgh) directly compares two regions in Canada and the United Kingdom to argue that changed political opportunity structures in both Canada and the United Kingdom allow regions within the hegemonic community, such as Nova Scotia and the Northeast of England, to articulate regional demands in similar ways. Dirk Hoerder (University of Arizona) in his opening essay of the last part of this collection, “Circulating Ideas in a Globalized and Transnational Context,” looks at the function and role of migration and cultural interaction on the development of multicultural practices and policies in Canada, especially since the 1960s. He further traces the appropriations of Canadian approaches to migration studies in Europe and the way in which these approaches have been slowly integrated into a growing academic understanding of European societies shaped by migration and in which they have been changed by migration. The second contribution in this section, targets the ‘travels’ of a more specific category and their impact: Katrin Urschel (National University of Ireland) discusses the term ‘Anglo-Celt’ as a ‘super-category’ to designate a dominant ethnic groups in Canada. 22

Looking at both academic discussions and literary examples, Urschel traces the genealogy of the term across the Atlantic and highlights the ironies and contradictions of this ethnic concept and argues for its abandonment in order to more fruitfully investigate post-colonial relationships and multiculturalism within the Canadian context. Daniel Drache, finally, in the concluding chapter shifts the focus to the public and its role as a primary site of recognition and as a terrain of individual achievement. According to Drache the public is changing in multiple ways as a consequence of technological revolution and globalisation processes. The changing public, so Drache, is going more global, and with it more defiant. These changes go hand in hand with the development of the cosmopolitan citizen that “does not need to choose between the community and identity that they were born into and the communities of choice that they belong to outside the traditional boundaries of their states and societies.” The central question is in which way the changing public as an arena to negotiate difference will affect individuals and groups in their aspiration for recognition? According to Drache all these changes bring millions of marginalized people into the new public domain and this will ultimately change the modes and interactions for recognition. The contributions in this volume offer an interdisciplinary discussion of the issues raised by multicultural realities in contemporary societies on both sides of the Atlantic and of the ways in which these issues are negotiated culturally, politically, socially, and theoretically. In so doing, they trace and think through the consequences of ‘travelling concepts’ of diversity, the question of what happens when different concepts of cultural diversity travel across disciplinary and country borders. It therefore seeks to build a foundation for further and deepened interdisciplinary discussion on methods, concepts and theories, a discussion that pays close attention to disciplinary ‘cultures’, as well as to specific European and Canadian contexts,– culturally, politically, socially, and philosophically.

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I. Negotiating Diversity in the Canadian Context

I.1 Theoretical Concepts of Inclusion and Exclusion

L’accommodement raisonnable dans le contexte légal canadien: mécanisme de gestion de la diversité ou source de tensions Pierre Anctil

L’identité canadienne a évolué, tout au long du XXe siècle, à la faveur de nombreux facteurs historiques, légaux et culturels, dont le moindre n’a pas été le passage du statut de colonie britannique à pays souverain au sein du Commonwealth britannique, puis dans le concert des nations. D’abord perçu par les principales élites anglophones comme un simple appendice de l’Empire sur le continent nord-américain, et par là comme une dépendance de Londres, le Canada a peu à peu acquis une personnalité distincte à la faveur d’événement marquants dans le cadre de l’impérialisme britannique, dont par exemple la révolte de Boers de 1899-1902 et les deux grandes guerres mondiales. Le sentiment dominant au Canada anglophone au moment de la signature de l’Acte de l’Amérique du Nord britannique, soit la loi du Parlement de Londres qui allait donner naissance en 1867 au Dominion du Canada, était à l’effet que le pays devait se conformer en tout aux exigences économiques et impériales de la mère patrie. Ceci signifiait voler au secours de la Grande-Bretagne lorsqu’elle était l’objet de menaces militaires graves ou quand elle requerrait l’aide de ses colonies sur la scène internationale, par exemple en envoyant des contingents militaires ou en favorisant l’achat de produits industriels britanniques. De fait, pour beaucoup de Canadiens d’origine britannique, jusqu’à la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, il n’a pas semblé y avoir de grandes divergences d’intérêts entre la Grande-Bretagne et leur pays, au point que la poursuite d’une réelle politique d’autonomie nationale canadienne au sein de l’Empire leur sembla longtemps superflue. Ce point de vue dominant a longtemps été appuyé par la crainte que la république américaine voisine tente de se saisir par la force de la totalité ou d’une fraction du vaste territoire canadien, dans le cadre de son propre expansionnisme, notamment au lendemain de la guerre civile de 1861-1865 quand le gouvernement de Washington avait à sa disposition d’importantes armées bien entraînées. Plusieurs éléments sont venus modifier radicalement cette vision d’un Canada se développant sous l’aile de l’impérialisme britannique, et jouissant du statut privilégié de «White Dominion» au sein d’un univers politique marqué par une forte stratification raciale entre colonies. Soumis à la volonté de Londres 27

après 1763, les habitants de la défunte implantation française en Amérique boréale ont réclamé puis obtenu dès l’Acte de Québec de 1774, un certain nombre d’avantages politiques et constitutionnels décisifs, dont le maintien du droit civil d’inspiration française, la possibilité en tant que catholiques d’obtenir des charges électives ou gouvernementales, puis le droit d’utiliser le français comme langue publique et officielle. Installés sur le continent depuis le début du XVIIe siècle et porteurs d’une culture originale comme Nord-américains, les francophones ont formé au Canada une communauté fortement enracinée et distincte, que la conquête britannique a pour l’essentiel laissé intacte. Longtemps plus nombreux sur le plan démographique que leurs vis-à-vis anglophones, puis plus tard fortement majoritaires dans la vallée du Saint-Laurent, les Canadiens français ont généralement été les premiers à réclamer, après l’accord fédéral de 1867, l’émergence d’une identité canadienne détachée des balises politiques et culturelles étroites dans lesquelles Londres souhaitait maintenir sa colonie canadienne. C’est ainsi qu’est apparue, d’abord d’une manière embryonnaire au début du XIXe siècle, puis d’une manière toujours plus insistante, l’idée que l’État canadien naissant se trouvait le fruit d’un compromis honorable entre deux peuples fondateurs et possédait en son sein des populations issues de deux grandes cultures européennes. Pour les francophones canadiens, la réalité d’un pays indépendant des visées coloniales de la Grande-Bretagne semblait aller de soi, notamment dans le contexte d’une canadianisation imposée par la géographie du continent et l’éloignement de l’Europe. L’insistance exprimée par les francophones canadiens à détacher leur pays des griffes de l’impérialisme britannique, se manifesta aussi en parallèle au début du XXe siècle lors de l’apparition de mouvements nationalistes dans un certain nombre de colonies soumises à Londres, dont l’Irlande, l’Écosse, l’Inde, l’Australie et l’Afrique du Sud. En ce sens, le Canada suivit là une trajectoire assez commune au sein de l’Empire, souvent d’ailleurs animée par des minorités linguistiques ou des populations dont les origines historiques étaient plus ou moins éloignées de celles des élites anglo-protestantes. Ce travail de sape en faveur d’un nationalisme d’orientation nettement plus canadienne mit toutefois tout près d’un siècle à aboutir, soit de l’établissement d’un gouvernement responsable vers 1840 à la fin de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, tant était grand l’attachement des anglophones à leur mère patrie et aux avantages que leur offrait une citoyenneté britannique modelée sur l’empire. Au cours de ce long processus, dont les conséquences ne se firent vraiment sentir qu’au milieu du XXe siècle, d’autres phénomènes historiques de grand ampleur se manifestèrent qui allaient avoir une influence décisive sur l’évolution de l’identité canadienne, dont principalement la grande vague migratoire de 1905-1914 et, après 1930, le poids de la république américaine sur le développement économique du Canada. 28

Au début du XXe siècle, les Canadiens en étaient venus à accepter, souvent avec une certaine réticence, que leur pays était composé de deux populations européennes assez proches par leur origine, mais que des rivalités coloniales et politiques avaient empêché de se fondre l’une dans l’autre. En 1867, au moment de la fondation du pays sous l’égide de la GrandeBretagne, toute une série de mécanismes administratifs et légaux avaient garanti autant aux catholiques qu’aux protestants l’usage d’institutions scolaires séparées, ce qui essentiellement signifiait que les francophones et les anglophones se côtoyaient très peu dans les sphères de l’éducation, de la vie caritative ou dans les domaines liés de près ou de loin à la vie religieuse. Peu à peu, particulièrement à Montréal, le Canada s’était érigé autour de deux communautés linguistiques parallèles dont les allégeances ou les intérêts ne coïncidaient pas sur les plans politique et socio-économique. L’évolution de la fédération canadienne, où les identités régionales étaient mises en valeur grâce à l’existence de provinces possédant un parlement autonome et une certaine marge de manœuvre budgétaire, en plus de pouvoirs exclusifs, accentua encore cette tendance. Une province en particulier, le Québec, devint le pôle de ralliement des francocatholiques tandis que l’Ontario en vint à représenter la mouvance angloprotestante majoritaire du pays. Cette binarité nationale devint de fait si ancrée dans les mœurs et dans les institutions canadiennes qu’elle fut reflétée jusque dans la nomination des juges de la Cour suprême, dans l’alternance linguistique des premiers ministres du pays et dans l’existence de deux élites culturelles et intellectuelles qui ne communiquaient guère entre elles. Sauf que le pays était désespérément peu peuplé au moment de sa fondation en 1867, et sa population presque toute concentrée dans la vallée du SaintLaurent et sur les rives septentrionales des Grands Lacs, ce qui en faisait une proie facile pour l’expansionnisme américain. Placé devant cet état de fait, le premier ministre John A. Macdonald, élu en 1867, décida de mettre en place un politique nationale visant à corriger les désavantages géographiques et politiques dont le Canada était affligé depuis sa naissance, dont l’absence de moyens de transports ferroviaires à grande échelle, un marché économique intérieur trop réduit et d’immenses territoires à l’ouest toujours sous la tutelle directe de la couronne britannique. Comme le chemin de fer transcontinental canadien ne vit le jour qu’au cours des années 1880 et que l’accès aux Grandes plaines ne se concrétisa que quelques années plus tard, c’est à son successeur à la tête du pays, Wilfrid Laurier, qu’incomba la responsabilité de mettre en place un vaste plan pour importer au Canada une main-d’œuvre étrangère puisée dans les vastes bassins de population que constituaient l’Europe orientale et méridionale. Alors que le pays ne comptait que cinq millions d’habitants en 1901, des dispositions administratives et consulaires furent prises pour accueillir à partir de cette date 29

des dizaines de milliers de nouveaux citoyens à chaque année, sinon des centaines de milliers. Entre 1905 et 1914, c'est-à-dire jusqu’au début de la Première Guerre mondiale, tout près de deux millions d’immigrants prirent le chemin du Canada, la plupart des ressortissants de l’Empire russe, des Puissances centrales, des Balkans, de la Grèce et de l’Italie. Ce flux, destiné d’abord à peupler les vastes territoires à l’ouest de l’Ontario, notamment les provinces de la Saskatchewan et de l’Alberta crées en 1905, ne mit pas de temps à se manifester dans les grandes villes canadiennes de l’époque, Montréal et Toronto, où se formèrent d’importantes enclaves peuplées d’individus récemment arrivés et ne maîtrisant pas bien les langues officielles du pays. Surtout, l’arrivée de vastes contingents de personnes d’origine russe, ukrainienne, polonaise, allemande, italienne et juive, dispersés à la grandeur du Canada, modifia en profondeur la composition ethnique des principales régions et introduisit un facteur de diversification linguistique et culturelle absent jusque-là. Tandis que le Canada s’était perçu à plus ou moins juste titre à la fin du XIXe siècle comme héritier des efforts de colonisation britannique et français en Amérique boréale, voici qu’une conjoncture historique nouvelle jetait sur ses côtes d’importantes populations de tradition religieuse et culturelle fort différente, et qui ne tardèrent pas à réclamer le droit de participer pleinement aux institutions politiques du pays. Il est vrai que les Canadiens, qui n’étaient pas à l’abri de la discrimination raciale et des préjugés de toutes sortes, eurent souvent recours au XXe siècle à des subterfuges peu glorieux pour garder certaines communautés à l’écart du pouvoir, ou pour les exclure complètement de l’arène politique et socio-économique, comme le montrent certains épisodes historiques liés sur la côte pacifique à l’arrivée de ressortissants du Japon et de la Chine, sans compter les vexations subies par les Juifs, les Noirs et les Asiatiques dans les principales villes canadiennes. Il fallut de fait attendre les années soixante-dix pour qu’un système de sélection des immigrants basé sur leurs compétences et leurs aptitudes soit introduit au Canada, lequel ne tenait en apparence aucun compte de l’origine nationale, de la couleur ou des croyances religieuses des aspirants à la citoyenneté canadienne. Les politiques migratoires de l’État canadien, pratiquées sur une longue période, modifièrent profondément à terme le rapport de force entre les deux communautés dites fondatrices du pays, et les nouveaux venus de provenance de plus en plus diversifiée. Peu à peu, et surtout à partir de la fin du XXe siècle, le taux de personnes nées à l’étranger se mit à grimper dans les grandes agglomérations urbaines du Canada, de même que le pourcentage d’individus d’origine autre que française et anglaise, à telle enseigne que les immigrants comptent aujourd’hui pour tout près de 20 % de la population du pays, originaires en majorité de l’Asie, de l’Afrique, de l’Amérique latine et le l’Europe orientale. 30

La trame historique que nous venons à peine d’esquisser a eu une forte influence sur la mise en place, au cours de l’après-guerre, d’une idéologie officielle visant à cerner pour la première fois les paramètres spécifiques d’une citoyenneté et d’une identité canadienne. Les années soixante, soixante-dix et quatre-vingt ont été particulièrement fertiles à ce titre alors que trois grandes orientations étaient énoncées à la faveur du mandat de Pierre Trudeau à la tête du gouvernement fédéral, soit la loi sur les langues officielles de 1969, la déclaration sur le multiculturalisme de 1971 et l’introduction en 1982 d’une charte des droits et libertés à la faveur du rapatriement de la constitution. Dans le premier cas il s’agissait d’accorder à la langue française un statut égal à celui de l’anglais dans les domaines de compétence relevant du niveau fédéral, et aux minorités francophones et anglophones un soutien plus efficace, notamment par la création d’un poste de Commissaire aux langues officielles. Ce geste de fait se voulait une réponse à la Commission royale d’enquête sur le bilinguisme et le biculturalisme qui avait siégé quelques années plus tôt dans un contexte de controverse assez intense, ainsi qu’aux tensions politiques émanant d’une société québécoise en plein bouleversement culturel. À peine deux ans après la promulgation de la loi sur les langues officielles, soit en 1971, le premier ministre Trudeau déclarait toutefois que si le Canada possédait dorénavant deux langues officielles, aucune culture en particulier ne pouvait être considérée comme reflétant prioritairement le visage du pays. Quant aux immigrants arrivés récemment au pays, ils étaient invités à mettre en valeur et à célébrer publiquement leur patrimoine tout autant que les deux communautés dites fondatrices. En somme, si les Canadiens pouvaient entrer en communication avec le gouvernement fédéral autant en français qu’en anglais, cela ne les obligeait en rien à se conformer aux valeurs culturelles du Canada français ou du Canada anglais, ni à adopter le point de vue de la majorité d’origine essentiellement européenne. Tandis que la loi sur les langues officielles et la déclaration sur le multiculturalisme accordaient des privilèges particuliers aux citoyens sur la base d’identités collectives reconnues, notamment en s’appuyant sur des patrimoines linguistiques, culturels et religieux spécifiques au cadre historique canadien, il en allait tout autrement de la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés de 1982 qui consacrait avant tout la suprématie des droits individuels face aux pouvoirs de l’État. Promulguée à la faveur de la canadianisation de la constitution de 1867, la Charte rompait avec la tradition légale britannique qui avait été la norme au pays jusque-là, et introduisait pour la première fois dans l’histoire politique du Canada la notion plus américaine d’une loi suprême régissant de manière formelle les rapports de l’individu avec l’État. Au cours des années qui suivirent, le gouvernement canadien modifia de fond en comble son discours sur l’identité canadienne, et chercha à calibrer ses interventions en référant sans cesse aux textes 31

fondateurs sur les langues officielles, sur le multiculturalisme et concernant les droits et libertés fondamentales énoncées dans la Charte. Déjà une des fédérations les plus décentralisées de la planète, notamment sur le front des relations entre les provinces et le gouvernement central, le Canada officialisa l’idée qu’il y avait plusieurs manières différentes et parfois contradictoires d’être Canadien, affirma qu’il n’existait pas de culture officielle au pays et rappela qu’il était possible de légiférer sur le front linguistique sans porter ombrage aux valeurs culturelles et religieuses des citoyens. Le gouvernement fut même confronté dans ce contexte aux revendications des Autochtones, qui voulurent pousser le pays encore plus loin sur la voie de la décentralisation, en rappelant que les Premières Nations existaient déjà comme collectivités pleinement autonomes bien avant l’émergence de l’État canadien. De fait, aussitôt redéfinie par un nouveau texte constitutionnel, la citoyenneté canadienne était déjà battue en brèche par certaines populations amérindiennes qui réclamaient même le droit d’ignorer ou de rejeter les fondements et les principes avant tout européens à leurs yeux de la Charte de 1982. La déconstruction de l’identité canadienne officielle, c'est-à-dire celle faisant l’objet d’une promotion dans le discours du gouvernement fédéral, autant au pays qu’à l’étranger, se poursuivit par la promulgation en 1988 d’une loi sur le multiculturalisme. D’abord perçu au cours des années soixante-dix et quatrevingt comme un soutien bienveillant aux traditions folklorisantes des immigrants récents, originaires surtout d’une multitude de pays asiatiques, africains et sudaméricains, le multiculturalisme ne tarda pas à adopter le langage de la lutte à la discrimination raciale et aux préjugés ethnocentristes. Plus la diversité culturelle et religieuse prenait de l’ampleur au Canada, notamment grâce à une politique d’immigration assez agressive, plus il devenait urgent de contenir à l’intérieur de limites raisonnables les opinions hostiles à la présence croissante au sein de la population canadienne de personnes et de communautés d’origine non européenne. L’État canadien insistait donc pour rappeler après 1988 que les nouveaux citoyens et leurs descendants restaient libres d’adhérer ou non aux valeurs culturelles de la population canadienne déjà en place, autant celle d’expression française que de langue anglaise, et que l’assimilationnisme ne faisait pas partie des stratégies mises de l’avant pour gérer l’important flux migratoire dirigé vers le Canada. Mieux, le gouvernement d’Ottawa était prêt à reconnaître que les populations de langue non officielles étaient libres, si elles le souhaitaient, de bâtir des infrastructures communautaires afin de perpétuer au pays leurs traditions culturelles et religieuses. Dans bien des cas cet acquiescement politique se traduisit même par un soutien financier à certains projets concrets dans le cadre de programmes relevant du Secrétariat d’État ou du ministère du multiculturalisme. 32

Le multiculturalisme fut en général très bien accueilli par les citoyens canadiens, sauf dans la seule province à majorité francophone, où une résistance s’organisa non pas autour du concept de diversité culturelle et religieuse mais en regard de l’indifférence de cette politique fédérale face à la question linguistique. Au Québec, l’intégration des nouveaux venus à la langue française, c'est-à-dire à la majorité démographique francophone, apparaissait plus urgente et aussi plus difficile à réaliser. Alors que les immigrants à Vancouver, Calgary et Toronto trouvaient normal et acceptable d’apprendre l’anglais en vue d’une insertion économique réussie à la société canadienne, il en allait tout autrement à Montréal où le français semblait beaucoup moins attirant et moins susceptible d’être adopté en priorité par les nouveaux citoyens. Pour contrer ce déséquilibre né du statut moins prestigieux de la langue française comme véhicule d’intégration dans le contexte canadien, voire nord-américain, le gouvernement du Québec s’empressa à la fin des années soixante-dix d’énoncer sa propre version du multiculturalisme appelé interculturalisme, lequel reprenait les principes de base de l’idéologie fédérale en y ajoutant un volet linguistique. Vulnérables à l’intérieur de la fédération canadienne comme minorité de langue officielle, les francophones québécois réaffirmaient ainsi leur attachement aux valeurs de pluralisme et de diversité, tout en prenant des mesures pour que les immigrants n’aggravent pas en s’anglicisant le déséquilibre déjà présent historiquement au sein de l’ensemble canadien. C’est à ce prix que les francophones québécois pouvaient se joindre à la mouvance multiculturelle, dorénavant décrite comme «interculturelle» dans leur société distincte. À l’usage il finit cependant par s’avérer que la loi linguistique de 1969 et la déclaration sur le multiculturalisme de 1971, y compris la constitutionnalisation du principe de diversité culturelle en 1982, ne revêtaient finalement qu’une valeur symbolique dans l’espace politique canadien. D’une part les citoyens n’ont que peu de rapports directs avec la bureaucratie fédérale et d’autre part les budgets consacrés à ces thèmes n’engagent annuellement que des sommes assez modestes. Qui plus est, les acteurs dominants de la scène culturelle et linguistique au Canada demeurent les gouvernements provinciaux et, dans bien des cas, les politiques et programmes avancés par les capitales provinciales ont contredit les principes de la loi fédérale de 1969 sur les langues officielles. Seul le Nouveau-Brunswick a finalement accepté de mettre intégralement en application le bilinguisme proposé par Ottawa et, dans la plupart des cas, les provinces anglophones n’ont proposé aucune mesure significative pour protéger leurs minorités francophones, sauf dans le domaine scolaire, et encore sous la contrainte de l’article 23 de la constitution de 1982. Quant au multiculturalisme, il est facile de constater qu’il s’agit pour l’essentiel d’une forme de discours abstrait dont fait usage le gouvernement fédéral essentiellement pour baliser la notion de citoyen33

neté canadienne. Lutte au racisme, ouverture à la diversité, accueil des immigrants et promotion de la pleine participation à la démocratie constituent les principaux aspects de la loi de 1988, avec parfois un appui plus symbolique que tangible à l’affirmation culturelle des communautés d’origine autres que francophone ou anglophone. Comme dans le cas des langues officielles, les provinces et les municipalités se sont généralement abstenues d’intervenir avec vigueur dans la sphère du multiculturalisme, ou de relayer le message fédéral en la matière. Il en va tout autrement de la Charte des droits et libertés, qui est devenue dès sa promulgation en 1982 l’objet d’un intense débat de société, non seulement parce que le rapatriement de la constitution canadienne s’est déroulée dans un climat de lutte politique acrimonieuse entre les provinces et le gouvernement fédéral, mais aussi parce que plusieurs observateurs y ont vu une tentative d’imposer des notions juridiques étrangères à la tradition britannique qui avait prévalu jusque-là dans l’histoire du pays. La loi suprême du Canada fut conçue après que deux langues officielles aient déjà été proclamées, après que les droits ancestraux des Nations autochtones aient été déclarés inextinguibles et après que les minorités d’origine immigrantes aient été reconnues formellement dans le cadre du multiculturalisme. Dans ce contexte, la mise en application d’une Charte valorisant avant tout les droits fondamentaux de l’individu ne pouvait que se heurter à l’affirmation des valeurs collectives de certaines populations vulnérables, que ce soit par le biais linguistique, culturel ou communautaire. Comme nous le verrons bientôt, les personnes appartenant aux peuples, nations et groupes minoritaires canadiens ne mirent pas de temps à comprendre que la Charte ouvrait la voie à des revendications collectives d’un nouveau type devant les tribunaux des droits de la personne, à condition qu’elles soient présentées sous la forme d’une discrimination visant non pas une collectivité en particulier mais un individu porteur d’une identité minoritaire spécifique. Au départ, la Charte s’appuyait sur le principe que le citoyen avait le droit d’être protégé, à l’intérieur de certaines limites raisonnables, des abus et des excès commis par le gouvernement dans la gestion de l’État canadien. Il était aussi possible d’obtenir réparation dans le cas où certains comportements ou mécanismes sociaux relevant de la sphère privée entravaient les droits fondamentaux individuels définis à l’article 2, c'est-à-dire essentiellement la liberté de conscience, de religion, de croyance et d’opinion, ainsi que la liberté pour les individus de se réunir et de s’associer pacifiquement. La Charte de 1982 protège de plus les individus qui choisissent d’adopter des identités multiples et parfois contradictoires, qui ne respectent pas les balises sociales ou culturelles généralement acceptées, ou qui valorisent des prises de position novatrices par rapport aux critères reconnus historiquement au Canada, 34

y compris sur le plan de la religion, des croyances spirituelles ou des signes extérieurs de la foi. La loi fondamentale vient même au secours des personnes qui refusent d’accepter comme valide et justifié le point de vue énoncé par la nouvelle culture juridique canadienne. Il peut s’agir par exemple de citoyens qui appartiennent à des courants traditionalistes autochtones, qui se déclarent fondamentalistes sur le plan religieux ou qui rejettent la pertinence des notions occidentales de liberté et de justice, sans négliger les gens qui préfèrent adopter un point de vue résolument anarchiste, qui valorisent le communautarisme ou qui considèrent l’État canadien comme une émanation illégitime de l’impérialisme britannique. La Charte ne fait par ailleurs aucune référence à la laïcité présumée de l’État canadien, ou à l’obligation pour ses représentants et fonctionnaires de garder dans le cadre de leurs fonctions une neutralité absolue face à l’expression d’une croyance religieuse. Au mieux il faut comprendre que le gouvernement canadien est tenu à une neutralité bienveillante devant ce phénomène et qu’il ne peut favoriser une tradition religieuse au détriment d’une autre, ce même si le chef de l’État canadien, dans les faits le roi ou la reine d’Angleterre, se trouve aussi à la tête de l’Église institutionnelle anglicane. Promulguée il y a maintenant un peu plus de vingt-cinq ans, la Charte a imprimé un nouveau mouvement à l’évolution du droit canadien, dont on commence à peine à mesurer les conséquences à long terme. Or plusieurs études et analyses canadiennes ont démontré que le principe affirmé dans la Charte d’une égalité stricte des individus devant la loi, conçu comme un droit fondamental et comme une protection légale face à la discrimination, n’a pas vraiment modifié la situation des personnes appartenant à certaines nations ou communauté minoritaires, contre lesquelles s’exerce toujours une discrimination systématique au sein de la société en général ou au sein de milieux de travail particuliers. Malgré des campagnes gouvernementales incessantes et malgré l’égalité réaffirmée de tous devant la loi; le racisme, le préjugé et la xénophobie persistent au Canada. Ainsi, des différences de traitement selon la couleur, l’origine nationale et la langue sont toujours bien visibles dans certains secteurs de l’économie et dans certaines couches de la société. D’autre part, des écrivains et des universitaires, notamment des personnes elles-mêmes issues de l’immigration récente, dont Neil Bissoondath dans un essai qui a fait date,1 ont fait remarquer que l’idéologie fédérale du multiculturalisme a eu tendance parfois à confiner les individus appartenant aux minorités visibles à l’intérieur de paramètres identitaires précis, qui ne favoriseraient pas entre autres leur pleine intégration à la vie politique et sociale au Canada. En créant ainsi des catégories de citoyens à qui sont offerts des programmes spécifiques, même dans un esprit 1

Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (Toronto: Penguin, 1994).

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de valorisation positive de la différence, le gouvernement canadien se rendrait parfois coupable de perpétuer sous une autre forme des lignes de fracture déjà existantes au pays, ou d’attirer l’attention sur des phénomènes d’identité particulière que certains individus préféreraient surmonter d’une autre manière. On note donc, dans bien des cas, que la Charte des droits fondamentaux et l’idéologie fédérale du multiculturalisme ont en quelque sorte eu tendance à limiter l’expression des formes de racisme et de discrimination les plus criantes, sans pour autant s’attaquer vraiment à la racine du phénomène ou sans parvenir à mettre un terme aux mécanismes sociaux qui créent les inégalités. Une des solutions possible à ce dilemme est venue sous la forme d’une notion légale typiquement canadienne appelée «accommodement raisonnable», laquelle stipule que dans des cas manifestes de discrimination, il est possible pour les tribunaux de consentir à un plaignant en particulier un aménagement à l’intérieur d’une règle juridique de portée universelle. Ce geste évite ainsi dans certains cas précis qu’un jugement juste et équitable de la part des tribunaux, conçu pour traiter d’une situation générale, aboutisse à perpétuer ou à reproduire des inéquités lorsque appliqué à un individu spécifique appartenant à une minorité nationale, à un peuple autochtone ou à toute autre groupe reconnu comme subissant des formes de préjugés inacceptables. Il est aussi possible d’utiliser l’accommodement raisonnable pour traiter du cas de personnes identifiées dans la Charte comme vulnérables à certaines formes d’atteintes aux droits fondamentaux, comme les handicapés, les femmes enceintes, les individus possédant une orientation sexuelle minoritaire ou des croyances religieuses fortement affirmées. Sous plusieurs regards, il semble bien que cette nouvelle notion apparaisse comme un apport tout à fait original dans le domaine de la jurisprudence associée à la gestion de la diversité, ce dans un contexte où le Canada reconnaît aussi l’existence de droits collectifs sous la forme de deux langues officielles, de l’auto-gouvernance des peuples autochtones et de la promotion de la pluralité culturelle et religieuse. Or il s’agit d’un mécanisme d’arbitrage juridique qui a été assez peu utilisé, soit 73 fois au cours de vingt-deux dernières années, bien que la cadence se soit accélérée à ce titre depuis moins d’une décennie.2 Il est important de noter aussi que ce sont surtout les cours de justice de niveau supérieur qui ont eu recours à l’accommodement raisonnable pour régler des litiges portant sur une discrimination d’un type ou de l’autre, et non pas les tribunaux appartenant aux instances inférieures du système judiciaire. Plusieurs jugements portant sur l’accommodement raisonnable mériteraient d’être traités dans cet article afin de mieux éclairer ce concept juridique cana2

Ces chiffres proviennent du rapport de la Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodement reliés aux différences culturelles, Montréal, 2008, aussi connue sous le nom de Commission Bouchard-Taylor.

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dien. Faute d’espace nous nous en tiendrons toutefois à trois exemples en particulier qui offrent des paramètres clairs et qui connurent un certain retentissement dans la jurisprudence et auprès du public en général. Il s’agit en ordre chronologique du port d’un turban sikh par un membre de la Gendarmerie royale canadienne dans le cadre de ses fonctions officielles (1995), de l’érection d’une souka sur un balcon privé par les propriétaires d’un appartement en copropriété divise, plus précisément au Sanctuaire du Mont-Royal à Montréal (2004), et enfin du port d’un kirpan en classe par un élève d’une école secondaire de LaSalle en banlieue de Montréal (2006). Dans chaque cas, les juges ont demandé qu’une exception soit faite aux règles générales régissant le fonctionnement d’une organisation publique ou privée spécifique, soit au sein de la police fédérale canadienne, dans le contrat régissant les droits et devoirs des copropriétaires ou au sein d’une commission scolaire, afin de permettre à des individus professant une croyance particulière de se comporter selon les exigences de leur foi. À chaque fois les juges ont défendu le point de vue que d’agir autrement aurait été priver ces personnes du droit inaliénable d’exercer leur liberté d’expression religieuse. Aux yeux des tribunaux, appliquer une règle universelle dans le cas de ces plaignants aurait ouvert la porte à une forme de discrimination inacceptable dans le cadre de la Charte, d’autant plus que le policier fédéral, le propriétaire de copropriété et l’élève d’une école secondaire cités plus haut appartenaient à des minorités religieuses reconnues, et susceptibles éventuellement de subir des préjugés inacceptables dans le contexte de la démocratie canadienne. L’interprétation qui a été faite depuis quelques années de la Charte des droits et libertés, relativement à certains plaignants reflétant la diversité nationale, culturelle et religieuse du Canada, a eu pour effet paradoxalement de renforcer l’idéologie multiculturelle du pays ainsi qu’un ensemble de valeurs collectives. Là où la loi fondamentale canadienne avait pour objet avant tout de protéger l’individu contre l’arbitraire de l’État, on commence à entrevoir maintenant qu’elle peut aussi soutenir indirectement des revendications communautaires ou relatives à des identités minoritaires. Il s’agit-là manifestement d’un revirement que la déclaration sur le multiculturalisme de 1971 ne laissait pas entrevoir à court terme, ni la loi de 1988 sur le même thème, toutes deux rédigées en des termes très généraux et peu contraignants pour les administrations publiques ou les entreprises privées. Le mouvement dans cette direction a été rapidement perçu par certaines minorités religieuses ou culturelles installées au Canada récemment, lesquelles n’ont pas tardé à développer des outils de lutte juridique afin de réclamer des applications particulières et des accommodements raisonnables auprès des cours de justice du pays. Ces méthodes de revendication, souvent sophistiquées dans leur compréhension objective de la Charte, émanent même souvent de groupes ou de communautés qui à prime abord refusent de s’intégrer 37

au libéralisme politique ambiant, ou d’abandonner leurs pratiques religieuses traditionnelles, mais comprennent très bien quel profit il y a à tirer d’un recours concernant les droits fondamentaux canadiens. En un sens, on trouve dans de telles stratégies une preuve de plus que le Canada réussit à inculquer à l’ensemble de ses citoyens, même ceux qui défendent une conception communautariste et traditionnelle de la vie en société, l’idée qu’il existe un espace de négociation et de dialogue au sein de l’espace public auquel tous peuvent recourir en cas de conflit ou de désaccord apparent. L’accommodement raisonnable doit donc être considéré, avant tout, comme un outil juridique permettant d’offrir un traitement juste et équitable, devant la loi canadienne, à des personnes appartenant à une minorité contre laquelle s’exerce une ou des discriminations avérées. Il peut arriver en effet qu’un jugement général visant de manière raisonnable le respect des droits fondamentaux, produise des effets négatifs et contraignants lorsque appliqués à des individus déjà susceptibles pour des raisons historiques ou autres de subir une défavorisation systématique sur le marché du travail, ou dans la vie publique en général. Or il arrive fréquemment au Canada, notamment dans de grandes villes où il existe déjà une forte diversité linguistique, culturelle et religieuse, que des négociations et des aménagements soient nécessaires pour permettre la pleine participation d’individus appartenant à certaines communautés présentant des valeurs et des croyances particulières. Parfois ces échanges se déroulent à l’échelle privée entre individus d’origine différente, parfois ils engagent des agences gouvernementales, des entreprises publiques ou des municipalités. Dans la grande majorité des cas, en effet, les divergences d’opinion ou d’interprétation entre tenants de traditions culturelles ou religieuses différentes se règlent à l’amiable, sans intervention de l’État ou des tribunaux, et ne nécessitent pas la médiation d’une instance supérieure. De fait, la tenue de procès où le recours à l’accommodement raisonnable sous sa forme juridique a été retenu, et donc rendu exécutoire par un ordre de la cour, a été l’exception plutôt que la règle. Au cours des dernières années, plusieurs affaires hautement médiatisées ont toutefois attiré l’attention du public sur la question des accommodements raisonnables, dont les trois jugements mentionnés plus haut, et qui ont fait croire à tort que certaines minorités culturelles et religieuses recevaient un traitement de faveur au Canada lorsqu’elles exigeaient des aménagements aux pratiques en vigueur dans la société. Alors que l’idéologie du multiculturalisme et la déclaration sur la citoyenneté canadienne n’avaient proposé jusque-là que des lignes de conduites très générales concernant les zones de conflits possibles entourant la diversité au sein de la société canadienne, tout semble indiquer au début du XXIe siècle que le recours à la Charte des droits et libertés offre dorénavant aux minorités de nouvelles avenues beaucoup plus prometteuses. 38

Ces perceptions ont été particulièrement vives lorsque les débats ont porté sur des enjeux religieux affectant la neutralité présumée de l’espace public ou lorsqu’ils ont mis en scène des groupes plutôt concentrés sur le plan résidentiel. Les enjeux d’égalité de traitement pour les personnes des deux sexes, présents dans plusieurs de ces cas, ont aussi beaucoup contribué à échauffer les esprits autour de ces questions. À Montréal entre autres, où la présence dans certains quartiers de minorités hassidiques, musulmanes ou sikhs est assez visible, les médias ont étalé, souvent à la une, toute une série de revendications entourant la cohabitation dans certaines institutions ou dans l’espace public de personnes d’origines diverses. Parmi les plus connues notons les démêlés de la communauté hassidique de Satmar avec un centre sportif et communautaire privé subventionné par la municipalité,3 l’ouverture non règlementaire de synagogues dans des résidences privées; les demandes entourant l’aménagement d’heures réservées aux femmes dans les piscines municipales; la disponibilité de nourriture cachère ou hallal dans les hôpitaux et centres de santé; le respect des calendriers religieux propres au judaïsme, à l’islam ou à d’autres traditions religieuses, parfois chrétiennes fondamentalistes et enfin, et non des moindres, la volonté de la part des usagers d’avoir recours à des professionnels ou des fonctionnaires appartenant au même sexe qu’eux. Pourtant, contrairement au kirpan sikh dans le milieu scolaire, au couvre chef utilisé par les agents de la GRC et à la souka érigée dans des propriétés indivises, aucun de ces cas n’a été porté devant une cour de justice et aucun n’a fait l’objet d’un accommodement raisonnable dans le sens juridique du terme. Simplement, les divers intervenants et les personnes visées ont préféré s’en remettre à leur jugement et à la bonne volonté de tous. La confusion du public et de plusieurs journalistes autour de ces enjeux a néanmoins perduré au cours des dernières années, notamment au Québec où une surenchère médiatique et politique a abouti à la création, en février 2007, d’une instance officielle appelée Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodements reliées aux différences culturelles. Il n’y a aucune raison de croire que la diversité culturelle et religieuse est moins bien acceptée au Québec qu’ailleurs au Canada, ou que le racisme et la xénophobie s’y manifestent d’une façon plus intense. On ne peut nier cependant que la problématique de l’immigration se présente à Montréal d’une toute autre manière, notamment sur le plan de la langue, et qu’il existe une plus grande sensibilité au Québec que dans les provinces à majorité anglophone concernant la place de la religion dans 3

Il s’agit du YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) de l’avenue du Parc qui, malgré son nom anglo-protestant datant d’un autre âge, est ouvert aux citoyens de toutes origines et de toutes confessions. Dans ce cas, les négociations ont porté sur la pertinence d’installer dans les fenêtres de l’édifice des rideaux ou des stores (ou des vitres givrées), devant cacher aux yeux des passants les clientèles féminines à l’œuvre dans le gymnase.

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l’espace public. Nous l’avons vu, le multiculturalisme canadien, comme idéologie de l’État canadien, ne tient aucun compte du facteur linguistique enchâssé dans la loi sur les langues officielles de 1969, et accueille le pluralisme culturel comme un phénomène détaché de toute autre réalité. Au Québec, cette approche est souvent décriée par les mouvements nationalistes comme pouvant mener à la marginalisation du fait francophone, particulièrement à Montréal où l’adoption de l’anglais par les nouveaux immigrants pourrait sonner le glas à long terme de la prépondérance souhaitée du français dans la sphère publique. La culture canadienne-française telle qu’elle se manifestait avant la Révolution tranquille des années soixante, était aussi caractérisée par une forte imprégnation du religieux dans la vie politique, essentiellement par le biais de l’adhésion d’une vaste majorité des parlants français à la foi catholique. Cette volonté de l’Église à gérer de vastes pans de la structure institutionnelle propre au Canada français a été rejetée en bloc au moment de la modernisation du Québec, si bien que les revendications issues des minorités religieuses sont souvent plus mal accueillies dans ce contexte qu’au Canada anglophone. Il ne faut pas négliger de considérer non plus que les débats de nature politique prennent souvent une couleur plus éclatante et plus insistante au Québec francophone, société où les citoyens n’hésitent pas à porter sur le devant de la scène des questions difficiles et à échanger avec vigueur. La Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodements reliées aux différences culturelles a été confiée à deux universitaires de renommée, Gérard Bouchard et Charles Taylor, qui chacun représentent un aspect de la vie publique québécoise. Le premier est un francophone appartenant à la mouvance souverainiste tandis que le second professe un attachement aux valeurs historiques de l’État canadien. Appuyés d’une équipe de chercheurs, ils ont reçu du gouvernement du Québec le mandat de dresser le portrait des pratiques d’ajustement à la diversité culturelle et religieuse ayant cours au Québec, c'est-àdire se portant au-delà de la notion strictement juridique connue sous le nom d’accommodement raisonnable. On leur a aussi confié la responsabilité de mener une vaste consultation sur le sujet dans toutes les régions et «de formuler des recommandations au gouvernement pour que ces pratiques d’accommodement soient conformes aux valeurs de la société québécoise en tant que société pluraliste, démocratique et égalitaire.»4 Dans les faits, la Commission était chargée d’une part de s’en tenir à toutes les formes d’arrangements «consentis par les gestionnaires des institutions publiques ou privées à des élèves, des patients, des

4

Voir le mandat de la Commission tel que décrit sur le site internet: Commission du consultation sur les practiques d’accomendement reliées aux differérences culturelles, «Mandat», http://www.accom modements.qc.ca/commission/mandat.html (juin 2008).

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clients, des employés, etc.»5 et, d’autre, part de sonder plus largement le modèle d’intégration interculturelle mis de l’avant par le Québec depuis une trentaine d’années, à la différence du gouvernement canadien qui avait plutôt privilégié au cours de la même période une notion de multiculturalisme sans recours à l’idée de laïcité. Au cours de cet exercice, qui a duré un peu moins de dix mois au total, la Commission a siégé dans 22 régions différentes, a reçu plus de 900 mémoires provenant de citoyens et de groupes constitués et a entendu près de 240 témoignages durant 31 jours d’audience. Les conclusions et les recommandations de la Commission BouchardTaylor ont été rendues publiques à Montréal le 22 mai 2008 dans un contexte d’intense battage médiatique et après de longs mois d’attente. Elles étaient attendues à la fois par les élus de l’Assemblée nationale du Québec et par les représentants de divers groupes d’intérêts, dont les fonctions publiques québécoises et municipales, les intervenants du système de santé et des services sociaux, les enseignants du secteur public, les syndicats et les porte-parole de plusieurs communautés culturelles. D’emblée, les deux co-présidents ont déclaré que la crise appréhendée dans le traitement de la diversité culturelle au Québec et dans l’intégration des nouveaux arrivants, comme le laissait présager la création de la Commission elle-même, n’avait tout simplement pas existé sur le terrain: Après une année de recherches et de consultations, nous en sommes venus à la conclusion que les fondements de la vie collective au Québec ne se trouvent pas dans une situation critique. Nos travaux ne nous ont pas permis de constater une hausse importante ou soudaine des ajustements ou des accommodements consentis dans les institutions publiques. Nous n’avons pas constaté non plus que le fonctionnement normal de nos institutions aurait été perturbé par ce type de demandes. (…) Nous avons aussi constaté qu’il existait un certain décalage entre les pratiques qui ont cours sur le terrain (notamment dans les milieux de l’éducation et de la santé) et le sentiment de mécontentement qui s’est élevé dans la population.6

En somme, rien ne laissait croire que la situation des minorités culturelles ou religieuses de la métropole québécoise avait été altérée radicalement au cours des mois précédant la nomination de Gérard Bouchard et de Charles Taylor à la tête de la Commission, ni que les dérapages réels ou appréhendés dans le secteur de la francisation ou dans le traitement des demandes émanant de certaines communautés ait porté à conséquence d’une manière particulière. Un tel aveu a certes beaucoup contribué à remettre en perspective les débats des derniers mois et à 5 6

Idem. Le rapport de la Commission est disponible sur le site cité plus haut, en version intégrale (310 p.) et en version abrégée (101 p.). Le passage cité est tiré d’un extrait publié dans Le Devoir le 23 mai 2008, p. A-9, sous le titre : «Le temps de la conciliation».

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calmer le jeu autour d’un enjeu qui a été l’objet dernièrement d’une certaine hystérie médiatique. De fait, ces propos étaient attendus par les observateurs de la scène montréalaise et par ceux qui connaissent bien les institutions et les réseaux les plus touchés par le pluralisme montréalais. Valait-il vraiment la peine de mettre en branle des moyens d’une telle ampleur pour en arriver à des conclusions aussi prévisibles? N’aurait-il pas été plus convainquant et plus efficace de la part du gouvernement Charest de se saisir lui-même, il y a quelques mois, du dossier de la diversité et d’indiquer dans quelle direction et avec quels moyens il souhaitait agir? Par contre, la Commission a apporté une contribution importante au débat lorsqu’elle a déclaré qu’un certain malaise identitaire planait au-dessus de la majorité francophone pour ce qui a trait à l’accueil du pluralisme culturel et religieux. Cette constatation visait à souligner l’ambivalence et l’incertitude de la population d’origine canadienne-française qui, sur ces questions, semble souhaiter à la fois conserver intacte sa sphère d’affirmation linguistique et ses acquis historiques, tout en s’ouvrant aux grands courants économiques et technologiques qui traversent le globe. La précarité de l’exercice annoncé et les obstacles qui continuent de se dresser devant la perpétuation du fait français au Québec, ont en effet convaincu une partie des francophones de résister à toute ouverture face à une diversité jugée menaçante sinon carrément néfaste. Bien que ce courant de pensée soit plutôt limité aux zones limitrophes de la grande région de Montréal et qu’il ne semble pas s’être emparé d’un pourcentage significatif du public de langue française, il a été suffisamment mis en valeur dans les médias et par certaines déclarations fracassantes pour créer un sentiment de malaise parfois prononcé: Chez une partie de la population, cette crispation a pris pour cible l’immigrant, qui est devenu en quelque sorte un bouc émissaire. Ce qui vient de se passer au Québec donne l’impression d’un face-à-face entre deux formations minoritaires dont chacune demande à l’autre de s’accommoder. Les membres de la majorité ethnoculturelle craignent d’être submergés par des minorités elles-mêmes fragiles et inquiètes de leur avenir. La conjonction de ces deux inquiétudes n’est évidemment pas de nature à favoriser l’intégration dans l’égalité et la réciprocité.7

Il n’y a aucun doute que la Commission a jeté sur ce plan un regard lucide en affirmant sans ambages que la communauté d’accueil, c'est-à-dire la majorité démographique du Québec, porte une responsabilité indéniable dans l’établissement d’un climat favorable au partage des cultures et à la pleine participation des minorités culturelles et religieuses. Cela ne signifie pas, comme le 7

Idem.

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comprendront certains intervenants politiques, que les communautés plus marginales soient dégagées de tout engagement dans l’évolution de ce débat ou de l’obligation de s’adapter au contexte québécois, mais plutôt que le segment de population le plus susceptible de donner un ton positif à la question de l’accommodement raisonnable reste directement associé à la majorité francophone. Il s’agit sans doute là de l’affirmation la plus courageuse et la plus conséquente de la Commission face à certaines interventions péremptoires des derniers mois, lesquelles tendaient à faire porter aux communautés minoritaires l’ensemble des coûts et des obligations associées à une intégration plus harmonieuse. En plus de ces réflexions d’ordre plus général, la Commission a aussi déposé 37 recommandations précises concernant l’intervention gouvernementale en matière de diversité culturelle et religieuse. Pour la plupart, il s’agit de mesures qui devraient faire l’unanimité au sein des milieux intéressés de près au dialogue interculturel et à la pleine participation des minorités. Parmi celle-ci notons la promotion de l’interculturalisme par une loi, la publication d’un énoncé de politique sur la diversité et l’accueil du pluralisme culturel, la mise en place de programmes visant la responsabilisation des intervenants dans les différents milieux sociaux et gouvernementaux, l’intensification de la lutte contre la discrimination et le racisme, la reconnaissance des compétences et des acquis professionnels des immigrants, une meilleure francisation des immigrants et enfin une sensibilisation des agents de l’État au port des signes extérieurs de la foi. La Commission a aussi suggéré de déjudiciariser les pratiques d’accommodements déjà en place, d’améliorer l’expertise des fonctionnaires et autres intervenants, de sensibiliser les parents dans les institutions scolaires publiques et privées, ainsi que de souligner l’excellence de certains efforts d’harmonisation dans les différents milieux de travail. Concernant la régionalisation de l’immigration, c’est-à-dire l’accueil de la diversité dans des portions du territoire québécois peu urbanisées ou situées en marge de la grande région montréalaise, la Commission a porté une attention particulière à la formation et à l’intégration d’une main d’œuvre composée de nouveaux arrivants dans des industries et des milieux de travail peu touchées jusqu’ici par le pluralisme. Ces mesures sont d’autant plus pertinentes qu’il est vite devenu évident, dans le cadre des tournées régionales de la Commission, que les réactions les plus négatives face à l’interculturalisme ont souvent émané de témoignages livrés à une certaine distance géographique de Montréal. Les deux co-présidents ont en effet parfois dû écouter impassibles des saillies antisémites et islamophobiques tout à fait inacceptables dans un cadre démocratique marqué par le respect de la différence et des traditions religieuses minoritaires. Il n’y a aucun doute qu’un travail considérable d’adaptation et d’ajustement reste à faire auprès de populations francophones peu exposées jusqu’ici au pluralisme, et qui 43

sont aux prises avec un sentiment de colère et d’insécurité face aux phénomènes de l’immigration, comme l’a montré avec insistance les déclarations à saveur folklorique des élus de la petite municipalité d’Hérouxville. La Commission cependant a été beaucoup moins heureuse dans son traitement de la laïcité au sein de la société québécoise. Cela paraît d’autant plus déplorable que la place de la religion dans l’espace public a semblé soulever lors des consultations et dans les médias une réaction passionnée, surtout lorsque les droits des croyants donnaient l’impression d’entrer en contradiction avec l’égalité proclamée dans les chartes canadienne et québécoise entre les personnes de sexe différent. De fait, un grand nombre des propos désobligeants à l’endroit des confessions minoritaires entendus dans le cadre de cet exercice provenaient de citoyens outrés de constater que les musulmans, les Juifs hassidiques ou les tenants d’autres courants spirituels, ne craignaient pas de s’afficher ouvertement comme tel, notamment lorsque vient le temps pour eux de réclamer des services de l’État. Dans un tel contexte, les coprésidents Bouchard et Taylor ont malheureusement paru avancer l’idée que les droits fondamentaux doivent être hiérarchisés, la libre expression des opinions, des idées ou des croyances religieuses devant céder le pas à d’autres grands principes juridiques: La mixité constitue une valeur importante de la société québécoise, mais elle n’est pas aussi fondamentale que l’égalité homme femme. À titre d’orientation générale, elle devrait cependant prévaloir partout où c’est possible, par exemple dans la répartition des élèves dans une classe, dans les cours de natation, etc.8

Les co-présidents ont aussi affirmé plusieurs fois que les décisions des tribunaux canadiens relativement à l’accommodement raisonnable en matière de croyance religieuse ne s’appliquaient qu’à des cas particuliers, et non pas à l’ensemble des individus dans notre société, semblant ainsi ignorer la règle de jurisprudence propre au droit fédéral canadien. Ceci amène Bouchard et Taylor à présenter à tort la recommandation suivante au gouvernement du Québec: Concernant le port de signes religieux par les agents de l’État : qu’il soit interdit aux magistrats et procureurs de la Couronne, aux policiers, aux gardiens de prison, aux présidents et vice-présidents de l’Assemblée nationale; qu’il soit autorisé aux enseignants, aux fonctionnaires, aux professionnels de la santé et à tous les autres agents de l’État.9 8 9

Idem. Voir les recommandations de la Commission telles que décrites sur le site Internet: Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodement reliées aux différences culturelles, http://www. accommodements.qc.ca/commission/mandat.html (mars 2009). On peut aussi consulter la version imprimée du rapport de la Commission sous le titre: «Fonder l’avenir. Le temps de la conciliation».

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Il est difficile de comprendre en quoi les droits d’une catégorie de citoyens, lorsqu’ils exercent leurs responsabilités à l’intérieur des structures gouvernementales, diffèrent fondamentalement de celles d’un autre groupe occupé à des tâches différentes. Pourquoi un juge de la Cour suprême du Canada ou un agent de la paix se verrait-il nier un privilège sur le plan de la libre expression, qui est accordé par ailleurs à un professeur d’université, à un fonctionnaire de l’État civil ou à un médecin dans un hôpital financé par les deniers publics. Qui plus est, il semble incohérent de promouvoir le droit fondamental des hommes et des femmes à un traitement égal, tout en refusant à certaines de ces mêmes personnes le libre exercice d’un autre droit inscrit dans la Charte. Certes, l’idée de proposer la rédaction d’un Livre blanc sur la laïcité pourrait contribuer à éclaircir un peu plus cette question névralgique, mais à condition précisément de s’éloigner des opinions émises par les deux co-présidents sur ce thème. L’autre grande faiblesse du rapport de la Commission Bouchard-Taylor consiste à avoir fait porter la responsabilité de la diversification accrue de la société québécoise aux seuls immigrants et à leurs descendants. En agissant ainsi, les co-présidents donnent l’impression que le pluralisme est un phénomène nouveau dans la société québécoise et qu’il ne touche que les citoyens fraîchement arrivés au pays. Sur ce front les commissaires ont semblé oublier que la Charte prévoit aussi protéger les droits d’autres catégories de personnes qui subissent de la discrimination en fonction de leur âge, de leur orientation sexuelle, de leur origine nationale, d’un handicap, du fait de la grossesse ou d’une vulnérabilité liée à leurs convictions religieuses. Par ailleurs, tous les individus qui sont nettement identifiables comme appartenant à une minorité visible, comme porteurs d’une culture ou croyance minoritaire ou encore comme locuteurs d’une langue non officielle, ne sont pas nécessairement nés à l’étranger ou de parents non canadiens. À vouloir faire porter une grande part de ses recommandations sur les immigrants récemment arrivés au pays, dans la francisation, dans la reconnaissance des diplômes, dans la régionalisation des flux migratoires ou dans la promotion de l’interculturalisme, les deux co-présidents oublient que la diversité québécoise est aussi le fait de la population en général. L’heure est en effet passée où les aspirations, les projets de vie et l’identité culturelle des Québécois se moulent docilement à un seul et même modèle recevant l’acquiescement de tous. La modernité sous toutes ses formes, la globalisation à l’échelle mondiale, l’usage répandu des médias nouveaux et la liberté dont jouissent les citoyens sur le plan moral, font que le pluralisme s’est installé à demeure partout dans notre société. Voilà autant de phénomènes qui exigent de la part des citoyens une capacité de tolérance et d’ouverture peu usitée. Rapport de la Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodement reliées aux différences culturelles, Québec, gouvernement du Québec, 2008, 249-261.

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Le Québec doit encore beaucoup réfléchir sur la question de la diversité culturelle, particulièrement lorsqu’elle se présente sous la forme des signes extérieurs d’une religion minoritaire au sein de la population. Cela est d’autant plus vrai que les Montréalais et l’ensemble des Québécois, sans doute plus que les résidents des autres grandes régions métropolitaines au Canada, ressentent parfois face aux phénomènes de pluralisme et d’identité multiple une crainte sourde qui est la conséquence du statut historique de la langue française au pays. Il n’en reste pas moins que la modernité et la globalisation des flux migratoires frappent à la porte du Québec autant qu’ailleurs au Canada. Au cours de la prochaine décennie, les besoins en main-d’œuvre spécialisée et l’abaissement des barrières culturelles partout dans le monde vont rendre encore plus complexe et plus déroutant peut-être le visage de la diversité dans la métropole québécoise. Le défi de maintenir une sphère d’expression française à Montréal en paraîtra probablement plus grand à certains. De même, les exigences d’une laïcité bienveillante et la nécessité de conserver un équilibre entre les différentes facettes de la Charte des droits et libertés, réclameront l’ouverture de nouvelles négociations peut-être encore plus difficiles que celles ayant cours actuellement. En soi, la Commission Bouchard-Taylor, menée par deux intellectuels n’appartenant pas aux communautés culturelles les plus vulnérables et n’ayant pas à leur dossier une expérience immédiate de «l’accommodement raisonnable» à l’intérieur d’une institution pluriculturelle, n’a pas beaucoup apporté de nouveau au débat de fond concernant la diversité, ni contribué de manière décisive à la résolution de certaines difficultés particulières. Les longues sessions de consultation publique ont de plus donné l’impression que les co-présidents manquaient singulièrement de sens politique, surtout lorsque des propos hostiles à la diversité se faisaient entendre à répétition. Ultimement, il revient aux élus de tous les partis de prendre leurs responsabilités dans ce dossier et d’indiquer la voie à suivre, en conformité avec les textes fondateurs de notre démocratie. Une commission, aussi savante soit-elle, ne peut pas se substituer aux hommes et aux femmes qui ont reçu de la part des citoyens le mandat de gouverner, et qui ont le devoir d’assumer de manière éclairée les grands arbitrages au sein de la société. À l’échelle sociale et politique, le véritable enjeu de la diversité et de «l’accommodement raisonnable» réside dans le message des élus et l’attitude que prennent les grandes institutions québécoises face au pluralisme. Cette conclusion va de pair avec la constatation que dans les différents quartiers montréalais, là où cela compte vraiment, les intervenants et les simples citoyens composent jusqu’à ce jour plutôt bien avec le pluralisme qui les entoure.

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Reasoning about “Reasonable Accommodation”: Charles Taylor on Negotiating Diversity in Canada and Quebec Ingrid Makus

Charles Taylor is a well-known Canadian political philosopher (recently he became the recipient of the internationally renowned Templeton Award) who has been preoccupied with and written extensively on the problem of (authentic) identity formation and political recognition in the context of a culturally plural society such as Canada. Taylor illuminates the contradictions that claims to equality and the desire for recognition generate, tracing their origins to the philosophical traditions of Rousseau and Kant. These contradictions have played themselves out, Taylor maintains, in situations such as the debate over the recognition of Quebec as a distinct society within Canada. Whether demands for recognition can be met, satisfied, or even addressed through procedural means such as constitutional reform has become a key political question in the Canadian political context. Taylor’s framework for assessing the possibilities for Quebec recognition draws on a distinction between procedural liberalism and substantive liberalism. How does this distinction account for the unique way in which the courts in Canada have united constitutional with political imperatives in dealing with the Quebec situation, exemplified in the 1998 Canadian Supreme Court decision on the question of whether Quebec has the constitutional right to secede unilaterally from the rest of Canada? The Court’s ruling sets out, in a singular way, principles that regulate the rights and obligations of a cultural minority such as Quebec in a democratic setting. More recently, Charles Taylor (along with Gerard Bouchard) has been engaged in a province-wide study commissioned by the Quebec government, on addressing the situation of cultural and religious minorities within Quebec. The recommendations made by the Commission include particular proposals aimed at fostering ‘reasonable accommodation’ under a rubric of ‘interculturalism’. In the first part of the paper, drawing chiefly on his essay The Politics of Recognition, I briefly outline Taylor’s account of how identity politics in the post-modern world is tied up with the desire for authenticity and recognition, albeit in a way that generates contradictory imperatives towards equality and

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difference.1 I also outline Taylor’s distinction between procedural and substantive liberalism, suggesting that it presents an impasse similar to the one generated by his assessment of the drive for recognition. In the second part, I propose that the Supreme Court decision (1998) on Quebec secession offers a way of embedding constitutionally democratic procedures that entail open-ended negotiation and debate over substantive ends. I also examine how the recommendations and underlying assumptions of the recently released Taylor/Bouchard report on minorities in Quebec, obviate or reinforce the paradoxes of negotiating diversity in modern liberal democratic regimes, as articulated so cogently by Taylor. Taylor on the Politics of Authenticity, Identity, and Recognition (1) According to Taylor, authenticity is associated with discovering or being attentive to one’s inner voice or self. Formerly it was attached to the idea of each of us having an inner moral sense which draws its impetus from an external transcendent reference point such as God or The Good. But in the postEnlightenment period, authenticity becomes disengaged from such external transcendent moral reference points. It attaches itself instead to the idea of originality. Each individual is depicted as having a unique way of being human by being true to their inner self. (2) The understanding of identity that emerges in the modern, Enlightenment period is similarly individualized. In the ancien regime one’s identity, or who one was, was established at birth by one’s given place in the social and political hierarchy. In the modern Enlightenment view, identity is perceived as something to be acquired by each individual. One’s identity, or who one is, is achieved as a result of the exercise of individual will. (3) An authentic identity is then construed as an identity that is not imposed from above but that comes from below in the sense that it is grounded in the unique character of a particular entity. It is generated from within rather than imposed from without. How does authentic identity formation become paradoxical? (4) Identity formation, according to Taylor, cannot occur in isolation or monologicaly. It can only occur in interaction with others through language and other modes of expressions or dialogically. Most importantly, this dynamic requirement manifests itself politically in contemporary regimes in the form of the desire for recognition. The politics of recognition is a politics of negotiation, where identity has to be won through interaction with others in a public political arena 1

Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25-73. 25-27.

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(in addition to the private one). To misrecognize another is to fail to see them as an authentic human being. (5) To the degree that authenticity is associated with uniqueness and originality, the recognition of an authentic identity becomes linked to the recognition of difference. The politics of difference then equates homogeneity with the imposition of externally imposed standards of judgements in a way that undercuts or prevents the development of an authentic identity. (6) In the ancien regime, identity is a given, established by one’s place at birth in the social and political hierarchy. It is also fundamentally based on the notion of honour or preference, which assumes and institutionalizes inequality among humans. The modern Enlightenment period, however, ushers in the idea of the equal freedom and dignity of all human beings. All individuals must be viewed as being the same in the sense of having equal moral worth and free will. To recognize sameness, however, is to run the danger of imposing external standards of judgement that undermine authenticity. Yet, to recognize difference is to risk invalidating the equal moral worth and dignity of individuals. (7) The crux of the problem, Taylor shows us, is that without belief in the existence of transcendent (non-human) standards by which we can make judgements about good and bad and right and wrong, we are left with human standards of what is good or bad, right or wrong, same or different. Yet, human standards of judgements are formulated from a certain perspective. But whose perspective prevails? Whose standard of judgement do we employ? More insidiously, do standards of judgement that present themselves as neutral, in fact reflect the perspective of the dominant and powerful? How do we distinguish what is a true standard of judgement from what is a false one? (8) These questions play themselves out in the political arena in liberal democratic regimes in the form of conflicts over whether the standards of judgement of the dominant culture prevail to the extent that the recognition of the equal moral worth of ‘minority’ cultures is a sham.2 Taylor illuminates the ‘political impasse’ that identity politics generates, and explains why questions of difference, identity, and recognition present themselves as issues of who has power in the political domain. Implicit in his analysis is the assumption that this impasse is embed-

2

For a good sample of how these debates are framed in the Canadian context, see Will Kymlicka, “The Debate over Minority Rights,” in Canadian Political Philosophy, eds. Ronald Beiner and Wayne Norman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 159-161; Margaret Moore, “Liberal Nationalism and Multiculturalism,” ibid. 177-179; and Dale Turner, “Vision: Towards an Understanding of Aboriginal Sovereignty,” ibid. 322-324.

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ded in the challenge to Western ideals of the paramountcy of truth and reason as transcendent referent points (formulated most cogently initially by Nietzsche).3 Taylor on Procedural and Substantive Liberalism In addition to placing contemporary conflicts over identity and recognition in the context of post-Enlightenment philosophical historical developments, Taylor draws on a distinction between two models of liberalism (itself a product of these historical philosophical changes) to capture how we can understand some contemporary conflicts over recognition that occur in the political realm. He has been particularly concerned with the debate about the situation of Quebec in Canada. Taylor presents the conflict between Quebec and English- speaking Canada as, a conflict, in part, between two models of liberalism – the procedural and the substantive one. The procedural model can be summarized briefly as having the following characteristics; (1) the state is assumed to be neutral on substantive issues which deal with the ends of life; (2) individual rights take precedence over collective goals (3) constitutionally embedded rules ensure that individuals are treated in a fair and equal manner in the sense that regulations are applied uniformly to all. This model, according to Taylor, is exemplified in the American polity. The model of substantive liberalism, in contrast, is one where (1) the state is willing to take a stance on the priority of certain ends or goods (2) some individual rights are perceived to be less fundamental than others; it is legitimate to infringe those rights for the sake of substantive ends in the form of collective goals (3) laws are applied in such a way that the collective goal is maintained. Substantive liberalism is the model that predominates in Quebec, according to Taylor. The substantive collective goal or end of the state is cultural survival. Infringing on less fundamental individual rights in order to promote and ensure cultural survival is considered a legitimate and necessary political means. With the advent of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, according to Taylor, Canada moved towards implementing the American procedural model. Quebec resisted this move, precisely because it challenges the substantive model of liberalism in which the state resists challenges to its ability to promote collective goals at the expense of some individual rights. What Quebec objected to was the imposition of a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as formulated by Englishspeaking Canada, which could potentially override Quebec legislation aimed at ensuring cultural survival. The subsequent attempts by Quebec to amend the 3

For an overview of Taylor’s discussion of the challenge to Western ideas of transcendence as originally articulated by Nietzsche, see Charles Taylor,“The Immanent Counter-Enlightenment,” in Beiner and Norman, 386-387.

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1982 Act by inserting a statement (that would operate outside of the Charter) that recognized Quebec’s distinctiveness could be understood as an attempt to ameliorate certain aspects of the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the Sections of the Charter dealing with language and education for example) which were viewed as undermining Quebec’s ability to regulate its cultural survival. Taylor’s account of the way that the two models of liberalism may seemingly operate in conjunction with one another presents us with an impasse similar to the one that characterizes his account of the drive for recognition of one’s authentic identity in a post-Enlightenment world. Both in political practice and in theoretical attempts to formulate a kind of liberalism that is capable of mediating conflicting claims over identity and recognition, Taylor’s distinctive liberalisms as he depicts them fail to generate a means of justifying themselves. An important question that arises out of Taylor’s assessments is raised by Michael Walzer in his comments on the essay – ‘Politics of Recognition’ – “when should we choose this way or that way, Liberalism 1 or Liberalism 2?”4 Walzer accepts as reasonable Taylor’s proposed answer in the Canadian context: the federal Government would operate under the principles of Liberalism 1 or `procedural liberalism’ making an exception for Quebec, whereas the Quebec government would operate under the principles of Liberalism 2 or ‘substantive liberalism’ yet treat minorities within Quebec as if it were operating like the federal government under the principles of Liberalism 1 or ‘procedural liberalism’. Yet, these answers do not follow from the terms of reference set out in either model of liberalism. Neither form of liberalism can provide an answer to why substantive liberalism is more appropriate for Quebec but not for other entities (other provinces, territories or First Nations in Canada, for example). Moreover, there is a fundamental contradiction in employing both models simultaneously in one nation state. To put the contradiction another way, if cultural survival is the key criterion for justifying a form of substantive liberalism, then minorities that perceive a threat to their survival have a greater legitimate case for and incentive for ‘choosing’, or more accurately, negotiating such arrangement than dominant majorities: at the Same time, not being in the dominant majority, they are less likely to have the political means to develop appropriate mechanisms for ensuring their survival. In the absence of an overarching international political framework or theoretically transcendent philosophical framework, these decisions are worked out in an arena where the entity that has more power than any other is the one that can most successfully negotiate its claim – whether that entails moving towards succession, independent statehood, or some form of selfgovernment. Walzer’s question is a good one but it needs to be reformulated and 4

Michael Walzer, “Comment,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 99-103. 100.

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elaborated to ask – “Who exactly chooses and who is this ‘we’ that chooses this way or that way, Liberalism 1 or Liberalism 2?” Jürgen Habermas points out that Taylor’s distinction between the two liberalisms does little to ameliorate practically or theoretically the contradictions inherent in liberal democratic regimes to the extent that they are undergirded by constitutional protection for ‘rights.’5 These rights are historically and philosophically grounded in the conception of individuals as ‘legal persons: yet individuals as legal persons need to mobilize claims to equality by collective means through political negotiations that engage them in contestations about their collective identity. Furthermore, Habermas suggests that no legal system, despite it claims, can in fact be neutral on an account of the good life. Every legal system presupposes an ethics that implicitly or explicitly recommends a version of the ‘good life’ and thus entails ‘substantive ends’ to ensure the survival of that form of life for its members. Taylor might respond that the solution is to work towards a fusion of horizons in which differing accounts of the good life along with judgments about the worth of particular identities are incorporated in a way that obviates the problem of judging one way of life or another identity as inferior or unworthy of recognition. Another way of asking whether one can find a way out of the impasse of the politics of recognition in post-Enlightenment regimes, as Taylor depicts it, is to ask whether constitutional developments in liberal democratic regimes can regulate the negotiation of identity in a way that provides acceptable standards of judgments that do not rely on transcendental reference points. If Taylor is right that both the characteristics of procedural liberalism and substantive liberalisms are necessary components of authentic identity formation in modern liberal democratic regimes, how can they co-exist? Such questions are the subject of extensive debate and the answers are varied and complex. I propose in this paper that we can look to a particular constitutional Supreme Court decision in the Canadian context as well as the recommendations of the recently released Taylor/Bouchard report on Quebec as guidelines in how to address these questions in a practical and theoretical manner. Supreme Court Ruling on Quebec Secession The Supreme Court Ruling (1998) on whether or not Quebec can unilaterally secede from Canada under the present Constitution put forth principles that embed constitutionally the obligation for actors in the Canadian polity to engage in 5

Jürgen Habermas, “Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State,” in Gutmann, 107-109.

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democratic procedures and negotiations in order to work out conflicts over differences. The ruling set put forth the following concepts: (1) Quebec cannot secede unilaterally in accordance with the Constitution or international law (2) Democracy is more than the rule of the majority; it entails a continuous process of discussion and evolution (3) Quebecers, or any dissatisfied cultural minority for that matter, have a right to initiate constitutional change, including secession. (4) If a clear majority in Quebec indicate that they are in favour of secession, then this desire has democratic legitimacy (5) there is an obligation on the part of all actors, including Quebecers, and other affected parties (minority groups in Quebec as well as groups in English-Canada) to engage in the negotiation, taking into account the interests of all parties.6 What is unique about this ruling is that it obligates Canadians to engage in deliberation about how to perceive their ends as a nation. It requires that this deliberation include participation by parties and or cultural minorities or majorities that may have quite different ideas about the legitimate role of the state in pluralist liberal democratic regimes. It requires that the debate remain openended. It does not guarantee that a particular definition of a substantive collective goal for Canada is defined and formalized, but it does guarantee a process of open-ended negotiation about substantive ends. Since 1988, the Supreme Court decision on Quebec has not been challenged constitutionally nor made use of politically by actors to initiate proceedings to succession. However, the controversy over the place of ‘minorities’ such as French Quebec within Englishspeaking Canada has taken on another dimension in the form of a debate over the place of cultural and religious minorities within the province of Quebec. Taylor-Bouchard Report In 2007, the premier of Quebec, Jean Charest, announced the establishment of a Government Commission headed by Charles Taylor and Gerard Bouchard whose mandate was to hold public hearings on the question of how far public institutions such as the courts, the education system, and social welfare agencies ought to go in accommodating requests of minorities for “exceptions” to publicly mandated regulations.7 After extensive consultations with Quebec citizens, public 6

For the full text of the Supreme Court Decision, see, Judgments of the Supreme Court of Canada. 1998. Reference re: Secession of Quebec, [1988] 2 S.C.R. 217 August, Docket 25506 at http://scc.lexum.umontreal.ca. (accessed August 2009). 7 Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodement reliées aux différences culturelles Québec, Gouvernement du Québec, “Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation: Abridged Report,” Gerard Bouchard and Charles Taylor, at http://www.accommodements.qu.ca. (accessed August 2009).

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agencies, private businesses, and government officials, the Commission released its report, the contents of which provided both an empirical assessment of the situation in Quebec as well as a normative framework for how the issue of minorities ought to be viewed in modern liberal democratic states. Several key themes emerge in this document, some of which replicate Taylor’s account of the tensions between equality and difference and substantive and procedural liberalism, others which attempt to introduce a new model of political negotiation that obviates them. This new model of politics could be called a contextual citizen model of negotiating diversity. The Taylor-Bouchard Report emphasizes that Quebec’s culture is distinctly democratic and liberal, democratic meaning that political power is vested in the people and their representatives and that the majoritarian principle is followed in implementing the power of the people.8 Quebec is deemed liberal in the sense that there is a concern with protecting the rights of individuals from the power of the majority. The report is imbued with references to a kind of liberalism that resembles the `substantive ‘more than the `procedural model - individual rights are not absolute; rules, regulations and policies must also respect “the collective interest.”9 Presumably, the collective interest of Quebec entails, most fundamentally, the promotion of French as a common language, and along with it, the cultural survival of French Canadians as a majority within Quebec and a minority within Canada Taylor and Bouchard chose to interpret their mandate not only in the (a) narrow sense of examining the strictly legal dimension of “reasonable accommodation,” a practise that has its roots in labour law where it means relaxing or changing institutional standards or rules in order to ensure that individuals are not discriminated against indirectly, but also in a (b) broader sense of examining the historical, social, economic and psychological dimensions of the debate over minority integration. The rationale for ‘reasonable accommodation,’ according to the Commission, is that any society with two or more cultures has to deal with the question of how to manage diversity. It is no longer acceptable, in Western liberal democracies, to simply have one more powerful culture dominate the other, through assimilation or elimination – “Democratic nations are displaying greater respect for diversity and are adopting methods of managing co-existence based on an ideal of intercultural harmonization.”10 This takes shape both in law and in every day life through interactions with public institutions such as schools and social welfare organizations.

8 9

Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 23.

10

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Traditional notions of `equal treatment’ do not fulfil the ends of recognition of differences in identity formation, Taylor-Bouchard stress. Reasonable accommodation is a means whereby one recognizes that “equality sometimes demands differential treatment.”11 Accommodation does not entail getting rid of the rule or law, only its discriminatory effect on certain individuals. It entails making exceptions to the rule or adapting rules for specific individuals.12 The rationale for accommodation (also termed harmonization) is that some rules are not in fact neutral: Sociologically speaking, we have observed that a number of apparently neutral or universal norms in actual fact reproduce worldviews, values, and implicit norms that are those of the majority culture or populations. Such as restaurant, airline, or cafeteria menus, which did not previously take into account vegetarians or individuals with allergies. Even if they do not exclude a priori any individual or group, these provisions can nonetheless lead to discrimination towards individuals because of specific traits such as temporary or permanent physical disability, age, or religious belief. It follows that absolute rigour in the application of legislation and regulations is not always synonymous with fairness..... a treatment can be differential without being preferential.13

The most consistent and striking theme in the Report is that it recommends strongly a model of ‘accommodation’ that avoids the formal legal realm (compatible with procedural liberalism), keeps the debate out of the courts, and places the solutions firmly in the arena of ‘citizen action.’ Priority ought to be given to the responsibilities of individuals and the community to “encourage deliberation, free initiative, and creativity in the analysis of situations” and the “dejudicializing and decentralization of the process of handling requests for adjustments.”14 This proposal is compatible with the idea that authentic identity formation cannot be imposed externally, but has to come from the bottom up. The Commission looks with disfavour on the (1) legal route where requests follow a formal codified procedure in which parties compete with one another and the decision determines who wins and who loses. According to Bouchard-Taylor, this is the method used by the courts to determine “reasonable accommodation”. The (2) route is presented as the more favourable one. It is less formal, relies on ne11

Ibid. The duty of accommodation is limited to (a) factors considered as grounds for possible discrimination in the charters of Quebec, Canada and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (b) Exceptions that do not cause ‘undue hardship’ such as unreasonable costs to the organization, (c) accommodations that do not infringe the rights of others, and (d) exceptions that do no prejudice security and public order. 13 Ibid. 25. 14 Ibid. 10. 12

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gotiation, aims for compromise and finds a solution for both parties. This preferred method is referred to as concerted adjustment.15 The Commission calls this the `citizen route’. It is beneficial because it educates citizens themselves in managing differences, as well as avoids congestion in the courts. This second method of “concerted adjustment” is more compatible with the values of interculturalism which require exchange, negotiation, compromise and reciprocity. It is a contextual, deliberative, reflexive approach that is attentive to the uniqueness of individual situations, requires that the interveners engage in dialogue, and allows for self-criticism. The `citizen contextual’ model closely resembles what the Commission applauds as the approach used to mediate requests in the education milieu. Here requests to use language other than French to communicate with the schools or to adapt rules to accommodate the wearing of headscarves or kirpans are subject to negotiation, compromise, and contextualism. This model “emphasizes the importance of a contextual approach, which, alone, makes it possible to grasp the complexity and singularity of situations (the case-by case approach). This model, which is receptive to the intercultural dimensions, avoids marginalizing the student and fosters discussion and compromise solutions that respect core values such as gender equality, freedom of conscience, fairness and secularism.”16 The kinds of negotiations that go on in the health sector are also applauded as being based on compromise and a consideration of the final ends of any sort of rules – to promote the health and well-being of the individual concerned. These sorts of deliberations assume that every individual is unique, has equal moral worth, and that differences should be accommodated in the interest of the general flourishing of the individual. Besides education and health, a third area in which accommodation requests are negotiated is religion which affects both the private and the public sector. Here too, it is acknowledged that labour laws and collective agreements reflect a certain religious (Catholic and Protestant) bias. The Commission proposes that the state be neutral towards religion and non-religion, favouring neither one nor the other. This means that the state should not forbid the expression of religious convictions in private or in public. The public arena has two components (a) the state and its representative public institutions (b) places of public use, that is, spaces that are open and accessible to all. Furthermore, the report presents a definition of religious that takes away both the transcendental component of it as well as the traditional notion of religious as requiring a community of believers.

15 16

Ibid. 52. Ibid. 29.

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It equates religion with any “deep-seated conviction” whether it is traditional religious or secular.17 The question of religion is turned into a question of matters of conscience. The Commission rejects the solution preferred in France of wanting to promote secularism and restrict expressions of religious differences in any public places. To want to emancipate the citizenry from religion shows a bias against religion in favour of non-religion. A true form of state neutrality would be neutral on competing notions of the good (procedural liberalism). The subjective conception of religion does not rely on objective considerations or proof of what constitutes a religious belief or whether a practise is in keeping with a particular religion. Instead, it reflects a sort of post-modern notion of the individuality of beliefs or convictions, of which traditional religious ones are simply one of a number of strongly held convictions. These need not even be moral or ethical – “the subjective conception reflects changes under way in the relationship to religion which often leads nowadays to an individualization of belief (a growing number of believers shape their visions of the world based on different religious, spiritual and secular traditions).”18 Another factor that is prominent in the Commission’s Report is the place of Quebec in the contemporary world. Increasingly many Quebecers have abandoned religious practise and have distanced themselves from the French- Canadian identity in favour of the new Quebec identity. They have also decided (until further notice) to belong to Canada and, consequently, to come under the jurisdiction of its institutions. They have undertaken the shift to globalization and, as the common expression would have it, “openness to the world.”19 The context of globalization has influenced identity formation in Quebec, as it has in most contemporary liberal democratic states. The Commission’s report warns of the dangers of uniformity, or imposing so called-neutral rules which have the effect of homogenizing or denying differences, rather than encouraging them to be expressed openly. So the Report does acknowledge some of the tensions and contradictions of modern identity formation and the negotiation of equality and differences in modern liberal democratic regimes. Identity formation is dialogical. It can only be achieved through interactions with others, whether of individuals in communities within Quebec, or the province of Quebec interacting as a whole with English-speaking Canada as well as the larger international arena. Permeating the Taylor-Bouchard report are references to interculturalism which “seeks to reconcile ethnocultural diversity with the continuity of the 17 18 19

Ibid. 44. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 11.

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French-speaking core and the preservation of the social link”. 20 The following components comprise Quebec interculturalism: (a) that Quebec is a nation (b) that interaction and intercommunity must be encouraged to overcome stereotyping (c) that Quebecers accept that their culture too will be “transformed sooner or later though interaction” (d) that cultural and religious differences ought to be displayed rather than confined to the private sphere as it is better to “get to know those of the Other than to deny or marginalize them” (e) that multiple identities be confirmed (f) that integration is accomplished through maintaining close links with family and other civil societal institutions (g) that multilingualism be encouraged but that French remain the common language of communication (h) that immigrants be given the means at first to preserve their mother tongue to give them an anchor (i) that constant interaction among cultures is desirable as it leads to “development of a new identity and a new culture” (j) that it be recognized that various groups in Quebec” define themselves with reference to common, often universal, values stemming from their history rather than their ethnic traits. Quebec is thus part of an international trend whereby societies choose to integrate diversity in light of shared values.” And (k) that the civic and legal dimension of integration be recognized as contributing to interculturalism.21 This list is extensive, placing Quebec squarely within an international context where liberal rights are deemed to be prominent. The Report recognizes a “creative tension between diversity and the continuity of the French-speaking core and the social link.”22 Yet, conflicts among these various principles are to be negotiated in a manner that is contextual and individualistic. This is compatible with Taylor’s notion that identity formation is dialogical and based on interactions in which the dominant majority recognize the `differences’ and equal worth of the minority. Integration would mean not assimilations, but the development of a new cultural identity. However, there are weaknesses in the assumptions presented in the report including the model of `contextual citizen’ interaction, which are not fully addressed by Taylor-Bouchard Limitations of the Taylor-Bouchard Framework (1)The Report presents as unquestionable Quebec’s commitment to French as the common language as well as its commitment to a policy on immigration as laid out in its Policy Statement on Immigration and Integration (1990). The policy 20 21 22

Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41-42. Ibid. 42.

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places a premium on a `moral contract’ in which immigrants are encouraged to learn French and to integrate as active civic participants in all aspects of community and public life. The Report uses the term interculturalism to describe Quebec’s policy of integration, rejecting the multicultural model favoured by English Canada as unsuitable for Quebec’s unique situation. Quebec’s distinctive situation is defined by factors that are absent in English Canada: (1) anxiety over the maintenance of the French language ( English Canada is not worried about maintaining English) (2) ‘minority insecurity’ in Quebec (absent in English Canada) (3) absence of a majority ethnic group in English Canada (the British comprise 34 % of the population) whereas 77 % of Quebecers are of French Canadian origin (4) English Canada is less concerned than French Quebec with preserving a ‘founding cultural tradition.’ Particularly noteworthy is that these factors are negative ones that are based on the kind of anxiety and fear over threats to ones’ cultural survival that the Commission tries to offset in the opening pages of the Report. Taylor and Bouchard try to diminish if not expunge the perception that there is a `crisis in Quebec. They propose that this is a `false perception’ generated by the media which has distorted the facts of several accommodation requests made in the last few years in Quebec and exaggerated their numbers. The misperception means that some Quebecers have adopted “a very negative judgement of accommodation practises, even to the extent of believing that they threaten social order and our most basis values.”23 The panic that ensued was stirred up by the media which created the perception that some were asking for and receiving’ unfair privileges – “The term accommodation entered public discourse and from then on became a hackneyed expression. Debate was no longer confined to the question of minority religious practises but now encompassed the much broader question of the integration of immigrants and minorities.”24 So the Report starts out trying to challenge what it deems to be an unfounded perception that there is cause to worry about French Canadian cultural survival in the light of accommodation cases, yet gives legitimacy to Quebec’s policy of interculturalism as an alternative to multiculturalism on the grounds that Quebec’s anxiety over cultural survival is a result of its unique situational conditions that propels it to promote integration along with immigration. So whose perception prevails – which one is ‘truer’? (2) The state ought to be neutral on individual convictions (this is compatible with procedural liberalism). However it cannot be neutral on certain nonnegotiable principles (this sounds like substantive liberalism). These nonnegotiable principles include “democracy, human rights and the equality of all 23 24

Ibid. 13. Ibid. 15.

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citizens.”25 They are moral principles which all citizens ideally should share, “although their deep-seated convictions may differ.”26 Once again, the attempt to reconcile procedural and substantive liberalism does not seem to work. What happens when deep-seated convictions such as religious ideas on the position of women in private and public spaces come into conflict with liberal principles on gender equality? The crux of the problem is a Rawlsian one – how can one have deep-seated convictions about gender roles and then engage in negotiation and compromise to mediate accommodation requests that take gender equality as given? (3) There are limitations to the ‘contextual citizen’ model of negotiating diversity. One is that formal uniform legal ‘impositions’ may be required precisely because individuals may mistrust case by case decisions which depend on their outcome on the abilities of the interveners to negotiate and make a `reasonable case: It is true that certain requests reflect a collective dimension but these are nonetheless handled in an individual framework, on a case-by-case basis. In the assessment, the judges take into account the possibility of “collectivization.” Thus, seemingly similar requests are not necessarily handled in the same way (a compromise formulate may be accepted in one instance but not in another). A recurrence of the same requests may also lead to the amendment of the norm.27

This raises the issue of equity – a principle of fairness and justice that demands that equals be treated as equals or that similar cases be treated in a similar fashion. Furthermore, the citizen model seems to favour those who are better at negotiating politically. The model assumes that the participants are intelligent, educated, and articulate enough to make a case for themselves. This favours those who are already part of the conversation. In the education sector as well, the contextual approach works if there is a shared assumption about the value of a liberal education, for example, or the value of a Western notion of health and well-being and a professional code of ethics on how medical practitioners must comport themselves. But here as well, it is clear that this model only works if there are deeply shared beliefs about the value of gender equality and of liberal individual rights, such as the right to govern one’s own body, which is at the bottom of justifications for access to abortion, for example. A key aspect of the Quebec situation is that its immigration policy is selective. Immigrants are often better educated than individuals in the host province (“according to the 2006 25 26 27

Ibid. 44. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 70.

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Census, 14.7 % of Quebecers born in Canada have studied in university, compared with 27 % in the immigrant population.”28) and they come from the middle classes, thus sharing certain values from the start. Because most of the immigrants come from the middle classes “and thus share in many ways the lifestyles of numerous Quebecers. It is a known fact that the middle classes much more closely resemble each other through their lifestyles than the less privileged classes.”29 So here is an acknowledgement that homogeneity in class outlook may be embedded into the system of choosing which immigrants come to Quebec, i.e. those that are more likely to share liberal democratic values. Too little attention is given to the question of relative power. Those who are more educated have a greater capacity to negotiate. (4) On the question of wearing religious symbols in public spaces, the commission recommends that public servants who wear religious dress, displaying their particularity and identity difference will not necessarily be partial. Accommodating such practises is beneficial as it encourages integration of immigrants into the public service. Yet it also recommends that some public duties may require some “self-restraint.” Some functions such as judge, crown prosecutor and police officer “embody the State and its essential neutrality.” Such individuals could be “required to relinquish their right to display their religious affiliation in order to preserve the appearance of impartiality that their function requires.”30 It is not clear why appearance is important in some cases and not in others. Should police officers hide their gender as well, on the grounds that they need to appear impartial? (5) The report recognizes that issues of underemployment and economic disparity are important, in particular for those who are of Arab Muslim background. It recommends practical measures such as loosening professional regulations to acknowledge professional qualifications and taking anti-discriminatory measures to deal with the experience of immigrants (in particular that of Muslim women). On the issue of wearing headscarves, the report says it that it has different meaning for different girls and women and concludes – “Why cannot individuals display their deep-seated convictions if they do not infringe other people’s rights?”31 The report tries to avoid the issue of what to do in the case of a conflict of rights, by claiming that such conflicts can be circumvented, conceptually, speaking. Taylor and Bouchard propose, arguably, that the courts do not attempt to ‘rank’ rights as a way of determining which is more important, rather – “When two rights come into conflict, the courts do not seek to determine which 28

Ibid, 79. Ibid. 78. 30 Ibid. 48. 31 Ibid. 84. 29

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of the two is superior to the other, i.e. to organize along hierarchical lines, but endeavour to hand down a decision in which the level of infringement of the two rights is minimal.”32 The report warns against making rights hierarchical, by strengthening the place of ‘gender equality’ in the Quebec provincial constitution, for example. In the absence of a common standard of judgement, however, there is no authority that can determine which rights take precedence. Yet how does one protect right to gender equality, against possible encroachments? The Commissions presents as a given that the values of liberal democracy such as gender equality are paramount. However, this adaption does not fulfil one of the requirements for recognition – that is acknowledgement of the ‘equal worth’ of other cultures. It presupposes the dominance of particular liberal democratic values such as gender equality. The crux of many of the contentious debates revolves around gender equality because it is precisely this value that distinguishes liberalism, in its historical and conceptual dimension. (6) Another limitation of the Report is that it had to remove from its mandate the “aboriginal question,” since this is a mandate that can only be negotiated ‘between nations.’ Presumably there was no agreement from First Nations and the Quebec government to examine this question. This is where open-ended deliberations among various actors in Canada, in particular those who have traditionally had the least ‘power’ in political negotiations becomes paramount.

32

Ibid. 37.

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“At the Mercy of a Putative Majority:” Difference as a ‘Problem’ in Canadian Political Theory1 Suzanne Gallant

We need to cut off the King’s head; in political theory that has still to be done.2 This paper will critically examine the latent normative content of approaches to difference in political theory via their conceptions of community and culture. I argue that it is particularly important and interesting to do so in the context of ‘Canadian political theory,’ at least in respect to its dominant strand – here I have the pioneering work of Will Kymlicka, Charles Taylor and the wide landscape of their philosophical legacy in mind – because it is widely regarded as being at the leading edge of international scholarship on multiculturalism and accommodation of minorities in Western polities. In ‘lumping together’ the works of Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor into what I call here the dominant strand of Canadian political theory, I do so not in an attempt to obscure what are without doubt important differences regarding definitions, influences, scope and audience. Nor do I believe that my approximate and slightly ‘rough’ reading of their work is a substitute for closer exegetical readings of their important and influential texts. I put them together because I would like to call attention to a very broad-ranging feature of their work, one that may also (though this is more difficult to assert) be reflected in ‘common sense’ thinking about multiculturalism, tolerance and its correlates both in official state policy and in the mind of the average Canadian. This broad feature is a framework that views difference as an a priori ‘problem,’ and more to the point, as a problem to be solved. The object of my critique is not to dispute the concrete difficulties associated with heterogeneous societies. Mounting tensions within social and institu1

The first part of my title is a direct quote from William E. Connolly’s most recent work, which was the inspiration for much of my own thinking on normative approaches to difference: William E. Connolly, Pluralism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 123. 2 Michel Foucault, Truth and Power: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 121.

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tional structures generated by the rapidly changing dynamics of global migration patterns, the explosion of ‘new identities,’ and the disintegration of certain classical/traditional modes of social cohesion are indeed very real and pressing matters for political theorists. Instead, my aim here is to critique a certain sensibility or disposition toward difference, one which views difference as a negative force from the outset and thus pre-emptively confines potential political reflection. In what follows, I challenge this normative understanding of society and propose an account of diversity and pluralism which (1) engages with the density of contemporary culture, (2) does not privilege established cultural identities over new, emerging ones, and (3) does not hold ‘social unity’ to be a valid goal and instead opts for a decentred approach to thinking the political. The Self, Community, and the ‘Neutral Framework’ Taylor and Kymlicka’s accounts of culture and community attachments stem in large part from an attempt to correct the reductionist perspective of the ‘unencumbered self’ central to Rawlsian liberal theory. To recall briefly, Rawls’s concept of the subject is that of an individual able to separate her private identity from her public identity. Rawlsian liberalism thus views liberal politics as proceeding from a (public) neutral framework which does not make any substantial commitments to any particular version of morality or account of the good life, and which instead relies upon rules arrived at by appealing to universal principles of justice. Taylor, contra Rawls, contends that the psychological and social impacts of community or cultural attachments are determining factor’s in one’s forming of ethical/moral judgments and political positioning. Thus the self cannot be conceived as existing independent of its social context. On the contrary, the self’s desires, attitudes and fundamental understanding of the world are products of the community in which it is embedded. Hence the liberal ‘neutral framework’ is not only implausible but also unappealing for someone like Taylor in that it completely disregards the deep attachment that people have to their cultures and tries to “[negate] identity by forcing people into a homogeneous mold that is untrue to them.”3 For Taylor, a larger role for culture and community attachments means allocating special minority rights in recognition of cultural difference and with the goal of the survival of distinct/different societies. This recognition is usually granted in the form of exceptional group rights such as in the case of aboriginal 3

Charles Taylor, “Politics of Recognition”, in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25-73. 43.

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communities, linguistic minorities (Taylor is in favour of Bill 101 in Quebec), and historically disadvantaged groups.4 Kymlicka’s position also has a greater attachment to community than the standard Rawlsian take. Kymlicka claims that “we have a deep bond to a particular sort of social group” and that liberalism must strive to provide a solution to the problem caused by the demands of non-liberal minorities.5 We must, however, reject the communitarian solution, according to Kymlicka, since it overestimates the scope of community attachments. While communitarians turn to groups that share a common conception of the good and that want to promote a politics of the common good, they don’t necessarily believe that this politics of the good could be applied at the (nation) state level. There is not enough ‘in common’ at this level; communitarian politics is therefore meant to be applied at a more local level.6 But Kymlicka maintains, out of his commitment to autonomy and the capacity for individual choice, that community attachments are only ‘partial’ and that individuals have the capacity to ‘stand back’, assess, evaluate, and even put into question their traditional/cultural beliefs. What is more, Kymlicka believes that individuals “should be given not only the legal right to do so but also the social conditions which enhance this capacity.”7 As such, the very thing that makes a ‘common national identity’ inappropriate or impossible for communitarians, i.e. the fact that it cannot be based on a common idea of the good, is exactly what renders it fitting for the liberal approach to politics. Here, the ‘national culture’ or identity is one which affords the individual a context in which to make choices and which does not hinder the individual’s faculty to evaluate, question and revise her values, creed, and ideas of the good.8 Ultimately then, Kymlicka reaffirms the ‘neutral framework’ of Rawlsian liberalism, but also adds a qualifier: ‘culture’ must be held as a primary good insofar as individuals require a ‘significant context of choice’ as much as they require basic liberties, minimum income/wealth, etc. Logics of Centre-Periphery Societal Dynamics Although both Taylor and Kymlicka make great strides in providing richer, thicker accounts of the self and of its relationship to culture, I take issue with a 4

Ibid. 58-59. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 92. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 92-93. 5

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certain conceptual rigidity common to both positions. There is a sense that in the thought of both Taylor and Kymlicka, engaging with culture is a highly centred process. For one, the recognition and accommodation of distinct cultures tends to posit a single homogeneous (civilizational) culture, which is surrounded by multiple satellite minorities, defined by different ethnic, religious or linguistic identities. These criteria, however, tend to privilege well-established identities – those that can be judged to “have cultural value” in Taylor’s case9 – to the detriment of newly emerging identities. In this section, I explain how I view the conceptual rigidity and centredness of Kymlicka and Taylor’s frameworks as flowing from their strong desire for social unity in the face of overwhelming evidence of disunity. What I term the ‘conceits’ of this posturing are expressed differently by both authors. Kymlicka explicitly asserts that allegiance to a community is always only partial, but the same does not apply to the national political community that he envisions as subsuming all other communities, namely the ‘neutral’ framework of the liberal state. Its authority, which is based on universal principles of choice, reason, and autonomy (which are at a closer look only particular to liberal thought), is never put into question, and the potential of contending authorities at this level is rejected outright.10 His addendum to Rawls’s neutral framework, that of the necessity of a ‘national culture’ only further reinforces the conceit of neutrality in that the value of culture here is its capacity to dispense ‘choice.’ Not only is this a hollow, ineffectual understanding of culture, but Kymlicka also doesn’t seem to anticipate the possibility that this context of choice, which is central to the operation of the neutral state, may also include the choice to refuse the liberal conception of reason, autonomy, and other such conditional elements on which the neutral framework depends. Thus, though Kymlicka believes that we can and indeed must periodically ‘stand back’ and evaluate cultural givens such as our idea of the good, our spiritual beliefs, etc., there is no need to do the same for the ideas that premise the liberal state that he endorses. As William Connolly points out, liberal thinkers in general tend to forget that their assumptions about “procedure, reason, and neutrality are highly congenial [to those liberals] who endorse individual rights and who believe there is a universal matrix of procedural reason drawing together 9

Taylor wants to be able to distinguish between allowing for cultural survival and recognizing the universal worth of all cultures since he wants to draw a line in regard to morality somewhere. As such, he calls for a judgment on the value of cultural expression (of others). Though he admits that finding criteria for doing so is difficult, he still thinks that they do exist in principle. See Taylor 1994, 62-67. 10 This desire for unity is even more clearly expressed on the outset, when Kymlicka asserts, “a fundamental challenge facing liberal theorists is to identify the sources of unity in a democratic multination state” (Kymlicka 1995, 192).

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people who diverge at other levels in their conceptions of the good life,” but not so congenial to a number of groups that contest several of these liberal tenets.11 Evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews, Marxists, Aboriginal Peoples, postmodernists, and even communitarians are told they must leave their ‘personal’ and ‘private’ beliefs in the closet when entering the public realm, while Rawls, Kymlicka and others like them “are allowed to bring several suitcases with them.”12 Wendy Brown drives the point home when she writes that “the notion that culture  whatever one means by it  is political is old news. But the notion that liberalism, as a politics, is cultural, is catachrestic.”13 In representing itself as being above culture or as cultureless, Kymlicka’s liberalism glosses over the practices, behaviors and beliefs that are part and parcel of its own historical emergence in Europe and elsewhere. For instance, liberalism’s imbrications with culture is, on the one hand, concordant with a set of “beliefs and practices about being human and being together; about relating to self, others, and world; about doing and not doing; about valuing and not valuing select things,”14 while on the other hand, liberalism is also well known to be actively endorsing a culture of individualism and entrepreneurship which does not survive the ‘test of universality’ (to say the least). Liberalism, in not acknowledging the preconceived values from which it proceeds often likes to construe itself as ‘objective’ or ‘neutral,’ and as such induces “blind spots with respect to itself.”15 Taylor, on the other hand, has blind spots of his own, albeit of a slightly different nature, and I shall need to take a slightly longer detour in order to make my point effectively. For him, the objective of reconciling common societal goals and safeguards to protect special status groups is directly linked to the aim of (re)fashioning a moral authority appropriate to all modern subjectivities.16 The implications of the ontological underpinnings of Taylor’s position have been the subject of much debate and controversy over the years. On the one hand, theorists such as Quentin Skinner and Isaiah Berlin interpret Taylor as a teleologist, a monological theist and/or as a proponent of a moral realism which posits the existence of a fundamental truth, vision of the Good or ground to the world, and

11

William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 124. 12 Ibid. 13 Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion – Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 21. 14 Ibid. 23. 15 William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not A Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 4. 16 Taylor explicitly states this in Part I of Sources of the Self – The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).

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that these must be reflected in our thinking about morality and politics.17 On the other hand, Taylor’s moral grounding is understood by others such as Steven White as being more of a “weak ontology,” that is, of a mode of founding that inspires and prefigures our orientation to morality and politics, but without absolutely determining it from the outset.18 According to the latter view then, Taylor’s framework does not set up rigid moral imperatives and thus tends to be open to new political possibilities. I agree with White that we must read Taylor in a more nuanced fashion than we would a Hegelian teleologist, and that he does not naively present his ontology as an absolute, single moral order. Yet Taylor’s system does not sufficiently admit the contestability of its own grounding. Saurette sums up this observation: “While Taylor does not share the Platonic model of ontology, given the choice between subjectivism and realism, he clearly prefers ‘to go on thinking of [himself] as a moral realist’ and so to speak of a ‘moral demand’ that ‘we discover’.”19 Let’s see how this plays out in regards to Taylor’s project of mapping our moral world. For Taylor, our moral orientation as human beings is very much mediated through sense-perception and emotions. As such, Taylor advances an organic and harmonious view of the process of thought and rationality where emotions play a significant role. For him, all persons share strong common emotionalmoral responses such as disgust and admiration when placed in certain similar situations. Such responses tend to point toward a common trend towards the moral and ethical life since they participate in a larger framework of moral judgment to which we are attuned. Thus, since all persons can recognize moral responses when they occur, and since Taylor thinks that they are designed to be strong and moving, all persons can potentially access the greater moral sense that transcends or binds us all together. In Sources of the Self, Taylor identifies these emotive responses as epiphanies, which are often triggered by art (especially Romantic art), though by no means limited to art, and they are evidence of the essential link between our sensitive faculties and an objective realm of morality (sometimes called ‘horizons’).20 However, for Taylor, this link is essential, and 17

See Isaiah Berlin’s introduction to Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism, ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1-6; and Quentin Skinner, “Who are ‘We’: Ambiguities of the Modern Self,” Inquiry 34.2 (1991): 133-153. 18 Steven White devotes an entire chapter to Taylor as a representative of weak ontology in his excellent book Sustaining Affirmation – The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 19 Paul Saurette, “Challenging Taylor’s Ontology of Common Sense.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, Halifax, May 30, 2003, available online at: http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/paper-2003/saurette.pdf, (accessed March 2008). Saurette is quoting from Taylor, “Comments and Replies,” Inquiry 34.2 (1991): 246. 20 See for instance Taylor 1989, 512.

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the (moral/ethical) recognition that proceeds from it is necessary and is, in this sense, binding for all persons, whether we accept it or not, for “even though we exist as autonomous subjects, we must nonetheless all recognize the ‘call’ these conditions of possibility place on us.”21 Moreover, Taylor is adamant in defending the position that we cannot do without these horizons and furthermore, that something in our natural, emotional responses recognizes them as essential.22 This identification of sense-perceptions, emotions and feelings as moral feelings is problematic for me. I believe that it renders one unable to critically assess the historical contexts and the potentially negative and destructive face of affects that are socially constructed via, for example, Western-centric, patriarchic and racist settings, both historically and contemporaneously. For instance, how would Taylor account for the feelings of disgust that many people feel, and often vociferously express, when a panhandler or homeless person stops them on the street to ask for money or change? Would Taylor say that these senseperceptions and emotional responses ‘hook up’ to a larger moral framework that transcends us?23 Ultimately, Taylor’s hand is too strong in wanting to incorporate all modern subjectivities under the auspices of one horizon or framework of moral meaning. And while he is much subtler than many moral realists, the grounding of his ontology depends on a move that essentializes emotions, a move which also must posit a transcendental source or telos. In other words, the fact that, according to Taylor, our emotions are essentially determined tout court demands an answer to the question of what ‘does’ or inflects this determination, every time guaranteeing that our epiphanies are derived from the moral place. This fundamental source to which our moral feelings are ‘accountable’ or ‘answerable’ is equivalent, for many, to what amounts to Taylor’s Hegelian commitment – his version of Geist – and is ultimately what renders Taylor’s system, in my view, too rigid and centred a position for the density and complexity of contemporary diversity. In both authors, we can thus observe the redeployment of centre-periphery/ hub and spoke logic which reveals an a priori commitment to a centralizing and normalizing rationale. In Kymlicka’s framework, the ‘centre’ is the neutral state, while the periphery is occupied by the various individuals that make up society and their various identities/cultural traits, etc. Taylor’s schema, on the other hand, places the moral horizon at its centre, which is then ‘backed up’ by a transcending source, logic or telos that impels all modern subjects to recognize their attunement to the moral horizon. Modern subjects would thus ‘reside’ in the 21

Saurette 2003, 4. Moreover, Taylor is in fact explicit on this point – see for instance “Introductions,” in Philosophical Papers I and II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1-12. 11. 22 Ibid. 27. 23 For further elaboration on this point see Andreas Krebs’s essay in this volume.

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periphery, but would be essentially tied to (again, whether they acknowledge it or not) the moral centre. The harmful effects of this type of hub and spoke logic are multiple, and, as I am arguing here, this is especially the case in regards to the ‘blind spots’ this logic induces, that is, the overlooking of the contestability of its own position. The Trouble with Tolerance The notion of tolerance is an excellent example of the dangers of centreperiphery type social logics. It is also a good illustration of the ‘management of diversity’ approach that supports the positions of both Taylor and Kymlicka. This point is quite simple: in spite of laudable intentions by ‘tolerance advocates,’ people seldom take pleasure in being tolerated since it entails an “onus of being at the mercy of a putative majority”24 that interprets its own standing to be unquestionable and beyond scrutiny. In other words, my claim here is that what is implicit in the act of tolerating another person is a belief that your position or identity as the bequeather of tolerance is the ‘right’ or correct one, whereas the other’s identity – the recipient or beneficiary of the act of tolerance – is automatically marked as either incorrect, regrettable or offensive, depending on the context. By ‘automatically,’ I mean that this marking is done without thinking or reflection as to what are its effects and consequences. Tolerance, in this view, can be seen as a paternalistic move, one that reaffirms a hierarchy of cultural and identitarian certainty within one’s own subjectivity/ personhood. In this sense, tolerance is reflective of the hub and spoke logic that I argued was implied in Taylor and Kymlicka’s frameworks. I would also like to suggest that this reflection also shows that this logic is at work in widespread popular thinking about multiculturalism in Canada. The task of unearthing some of the normative issues entailed in such ‘common sense’ thinking about tolerance thus becomes an important and pressing endeavour. The narrative of tolerance in Canada, for example, could be viewed as follows: a public culture of the whitestream occupies the centre,25 while a series of satellite identities are permitted to revolve around it. However, before I go on, I would like to make it clear that I am not ‘against tolerance’ so to speak. Our routine exercise of tolerance at many levels is without 24 25

Connolly 2005, 123. The term ‘whitestream’ has been coined by Canadian sociologist Claude Denis and denotes the idea that though Canadian society is not altogether white with respect to sociodemographics, it remains primarily and essentially structured on the basis of the Anglo-European white experience; see We Are Not You: First Nations and Canadian Modernity (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1997).

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a doubt a social good in many settings. Michael Walzer, for instance, makes a useful distinction between tolerance as virtue or an attitude and toleration as a practice.26 It is when tolerance becomes unquestionably a virtue or an ethical stance to live by that its operations of power and normalization are rendered problematic. Critically assessing some of the latent dynamics of tolerance as a political discourse then should not be understood as denying or repudiating the value of common place tolerance in attenuating certain types of violence and abuse. The aim of my critique is rather focused on calling to attention the danger of tolerance as the “telos of multicultural citizenship,”27 a possibility altogether not implausible in contemporary Canadian society. In her recent book Regulating Aversion, Wendy Brown remarks that “a mere generation ago, tolerance was widely recognized in the United States as a code word for mannered racialism.”28 The central thread of her work thus asks how a term designating ‘polite racism’ came to signify, in today’s world, a key liberal virtue of Western society. Taking up a manifestly foucauldian approach, Brown’s project traces the complex inter-involvement of tolerance with power and attempts to grasp the manners in which tolerance has “effects that exceed its surface operations of [...] reducing conflicts or of protecting the weak or the minoritized.”29 One such effect is the cloaking of disdain by a compensatory feeling of moral rectitude: Like patience, tolerance is necessitated by something one would prefer did not exist […] In this activity of management, tolerance does not offer resolution or transcendence, but only a strategy for coping […] As compensation, tolerance anoints the bearer with virtue, with standing for a principled act of permitting one’s principles to be affronted; it provides a gracious way of allowing one’s tastes to be violated. It offers a robe of modest superiority in exchange for yielding.30

Hence, tolerance may not only cloak a more profound disdain for the other, but it may also ‘reward’ its practitioner with a certain feeling of moral righteousness. While some may be inclined to view such characterizations as exaggerated or as a statement of bad faith, the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us that the Latin root of tolerance denotes to bear something of which one disapproves. The following are three different variations on the meaning of tolerance as listed by the OED: “(1) the action or practice of enduring pain or hardship; (2) the action of allowing; license, permission granted by an authority; and (3) the disposition to 26

Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997). Brown 2006, 5. 28 Ibid. 1. 29 Ibid. 27-28. 30 Ibid. 25. 27

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be patient with or indulgent to the opinions of practices of others; freedom from bigotry […] in judging the conduct of others.”31 These definitions bring to light the fact that there is more than ‘pure generosity’ at play in acts of tolerance. They also implore us to ask when and on what grounds do we – as instigators of tolerance – gain this power, luxury and position from which to allow, be indulgent and endure? More than just evincing a lack of neutrality or respect, it may be that these definitions imply that tolerance “carries within it an antagonism toward alterity as well as the capacity for normalization.”32 Put differently, it may be that “magnanimity is always a luxury of power.”33 Brown also notes how in the lexicons of domains as diverse as statistics, engineering, physiology (plant and human), policing and prosecution, invoking the word tolerance always implies that a contaminant, a foreign body or something dangerous is stirring. Tolerance is then applied as a “mode of incorporating and regulating the presence of the threatening Other within.”34 Seen through this lens, tolerance is arguably a tool with which to ‘manage’ the threat of difference and thus simultaneously ensure the continuity of the dominant substance/body/force/identity, depending on the context. Brown then goes on to discuss that the brilliance and effectiveness of tolerance as such an instrument of difference management is that it appears merely as a “genial neighbourly value”35 while clearly serving more ominous political purposes of stratification, licensing and regulation. Another effect of tolerance is that it may contribute to a sustaining of the threatening difference. As a middle ground of sorts between rejecting an identity and assimilating it, tolerance may work along the lines of what sociologists call ascriptive identities. For instance, “what children are ‘taught’ to tolerate is neither groups nor precisely individuals but, rather, subjects […] of a very particular sort: they harbour orders of belief, practices, or desire cast as significant enough to provoke the rejection or hostility that makes tolerance necessary.”36 Tolerating a person, in this sense, may ‘mark’ her as being significantly different enough to be deemed the valid object of future toleration either by me or by others. Here we are only one small step removed from what is arguably a slippery slope toward essentializing the identity of the tolerated person before us and “thereby reinscribing the marginalization of the already marginal.”37 This of course only works because we are able to contrast the marginal against the ‘normal,’ which 31

As cited by Brown 25, author’s emphasis. Ibid. 26. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 27. 35 Ibid. 38. 36 Ibid. 45, my emphasis. 37 Ibid. 32

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in instances of toleration is our own identity and thus unconsciously “deposit” all otherness “in that which is tolerated.”38 In the moment of an act of tolerance then, we erase/foreclose the possibility for a critical self-reflexivity that would identify us as the ones who are, just maybe, the strange, the marginal, the minoritarian. As a result, one other hidden consequence of tolerance may be the repeated performance (in Butler’s sense of the term) and inscription of the tolerator’s own identity as normal, stable and fixed. That is not to say that we are all ill-intentioned persons/subjects who deliberately seek confirmation of our identity to the detriment of others whom we cast as deviant. Many of the claims supported in this essay rely on a view of the dynamics at play in the very process of identity formation at the level of subjectivity theory. This next section will then take a step back from my explicit critique of centre-periphery logics and the political discourse of tolerance in order to better elucidate an understanding of what goes on at the level of our subjectivity and explore the nature of how identities (cultural, social and other) come into being. Taylor and Kymlicka, it should be noted, barely touch the surface of identity formation processes; but it is my belief that such an account is necessary in order to better understand the complexity and density of contemporary pluralism. At the very least, such an account of underlying dynamics better equips us to trace the subterranean elements at work in the more subtle, but no less harmful, forms of racism, sexism and other prejudices that persist in societies today. Identity/Difference & the Processes of Identity Formation In this section, I turn to a brief discussion of some of the concepts that underscore my argument regarding the conceits of the centredness of Taylor and Kymlicka’s theoretical frameworks and the ubiquitous lack of reflexivity and contestability in acts of tolerance. While Taylor and Kymlicka do acknowledge the importance of the inter-relationship between individuals in society and also recognize the impact that identity can have on collective action, neither of them give a specific account of how subjectivities interact with one another or of how identity comes to be in the first place. My wager here is that this may partially explain why their frameworks tend to induce the blindspots discussed above. My main point will be to show how identity is contingent upon difference, and how a paradoxical drive to diminish difference is manifest within identity itself. Following mainly the work of William Connolly, I will discuss how intersubjectivity is inextricably linked to identity/difference formations. 38

Ibid.

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According to Connolly, identity is at once ubiquitous in late modern life and premised on contingent formations. That is not to say that some of these contingencies are not deeply and more or less permanently entrenched or that they are somehow not as important, valued, or influential because of their contingent character. But a notion of contingent identity formation does say that any number of given contingencies could have been otherwise given the time and place of birth, the mixtures of tradition or religion into which one is born, the various child-rearing practices, the specific life experiences or traumas, and the dramatic public events that shape our lives. Further, “to confess a particular identity is also to belong to difference.”39 In other words, identity is always relational and thus depends on the common constituencies with which we associate and with which others associate/designate us – as a white, female, atheist, middle-class, heterosexual, Canadian for example. These aspects of our identity are further elucidated by opposition to what we are not, e.g. a set of differences that work to crystallize these identifying features – person of colour, male, theist, lower or ‘working’ class, homosexual, and American to follow the above example. Without these (socially recognized) differences, identity characteristics would have little or no social and symbolic meaning. To be ‘Canadian’ would lose all its sense if no other national affiliation existed. Hence, series of differences ‘coexist’ in order for identity to be: “differences provide…the shadings and contrasts that animate [identity].”40 However, the notion is complicated for Connolly by what he calls “the drive to diminish difference.” Paradoxically, though difference is what permits/enables identity, the pursuit of identity contains a propensity for reducing difference, if not eliminating it altogether. This is also where the construction of Otherness comes into play. The initial tendency is to describe the differences on which you depend in a way that gives privilege or priority to you. Jews, said Kant, are legalistic; that definition allowed him to define Kantian-Christian morality as a more spiritual orientation to duties and rights. Atheists, said Tocqueville, are restless, egoistic, and amoral, lacking the spiritual source of morality upon which stability, trustworthiness, and care for others are anchored. That definition allowed him to honor the American passion to exclude professed atheists from public office.41

Thus for Connolly there exists a temptation or drive within the dynamic of identity to mark constitutive differences as abnormal, deviant or immoral. However, 39

William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xiv. 40 Connolly 1999, 144. 41 Connolly 2002, xiv.

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this paradox is neither deterministic nor a “formal paradox of logic:” it is a social paradox that is susceptible to being negotiated,42 a structural temptation stemming from the imperatives of social organization. It operates as a need for certainty, wholeness and reassurance in our identities. This tendency acts “to congeal established identities into fixed forms, thought and lived as if their structure expressed the true order of things.”43 And this is accomplished by marginalizing or even shutting out the differences that help constitute these same identities. This propensity therefore effectively attempts to deny the very diversity that fundamentally defines identity in the first place. “The paradoxical element circulating through relations of identity/difference, then, is that every identity needs a set of differences through which to define itself, while its imagination of wholeness can also translate that affirmative condition of possibility into a primordial threat.”44 For Connolly, the point is not that others don’t ever really pose a threat to your identity, but rather that some dangers to your identity are products of an imagination of wholeness that is never achievable. The identity/difference dynamics and the accompanying paradoxical drive to diminish difference are evident in numerous contemporary examples. The explosion of new identities, what William Connolly calls the politics of becoming, where a new ‘cultural constituency’ attempts to pass the threshold onto a (socially, legally) recognized register of identities can often unsettle the existing constellation of established identities, thus provoking strong reactionary responses on the part of the dominant cultural group which must suddenly ‘make room for’ newcomers. A good example of this unsettling of established identities was seen in the campaign mounted against the legalization of gay marriage in Canada in 2005. Though the bill contained a clause guaranteeing the right of any parish or church not to marry couples of the same sex on account of their moral and religious beliefs, a large number of Christians from across the country were vehemently opposed to the principle of rewriting the legal definition of marriage – this was felt as an affront to the integrity of their own identity. In this case, it is possible to assume that marriage, as a deeply valued Christian institution that structures and sanctifies the identity and beliefs of Christians, is defined in large part by the fact that it is distinct from and (in moral terms) elevated above other types of units of social organization such as civil unions (unions not blessed by the Church, but by a clerk of the court), looser or more temporary types of cohabitation between a man and a woman, and between two people of the same sex, etc. If the value of this institution were not intrinsically tied up with what is deemed as other, less ‘legitimate’ types of union, then it would arguably lose 42 43 44

Ibid. xv. Ibid. 64. Connolly 1999, 144.

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much of its meaning and signification, and it would certainly have not precipitated, for instance, protest after protest outside Canada’s Parliament. Thus the rewriting of the very terms of condition of marriage was felt as an affront to the integrity of the institution and its corresponding cultural identity since it shifts the entire constellation of identities and meanings on which it depends for securing its place and worth. Here we have an example of a dominant identity  Christian ‘marriagedom’ – that is forced into renegotiating its core terms – in this case to eliminate the criteria of sex, a criterion which had been upheld for centuries  because of the emergent peripheral identity instigated by the gay rights movement. This interweaving of identity/difference elements in the very formation of identity thus also implies that peripheral identities have the capacity to affect identities or moral horizons occupying the centre, no matter how much one thinks this centre can be universalized or grounded fundamentally – and I would also add, no matter how much one tries to displace, push back or ‘neutralize’ such a centre. My wager is that we will tend to witness more and more such ‘forced renegotiations’ of the terms of many core identities with the increased pace at which globalized capital is moving, along with greater transnational mobility, transcultural interactions and the intensification of uncertainties in various domains. Some of these renegotiations will be met with active resistance, some will be rather welcomed. (And in fact more than a few church groups in Canada were in favour of extending marriage to same-sex couples though this was often overshadowed by the louder, dissenting view). My claim here is that being open to such renegotiations, and more specifically, actively including in one’s framework the inevitability of these shifts and renegotiations in the constellation of contemporary culture and identity politics, is an ethical posturing more sensitive and appropriate to pluralistic societies. This does not mean that as political theorists we can determine the outcome of such renegotiations from the outset. In this particular case, the renegotiation meant extending marriage to same-sex couples and thus formally inscribing a new right into law; however, different types of identity shifts in different cultural contexts will undoubtedly require other modes of renegotiation. What this does mean, however, is that a more sensitive and timely approach to political theory would posit an a priori openness to the changing constellation of identities as well as an understanding that relational traits in identity/difference formations stress the collective and interdependent nature of the construction of the self and its (necessary) indebtedness to difference itself. Along these lines, we may also want to consider Bonnie Honig’s expansive view of culture as “a way of life, a rich and timeworn grammar of human

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activity, a set of diverse and often conflicting narratives whereby communal (mis)understandings, roles, and responsibilities are negotiated.”45 In spite of the dangers of translating difference into otherness, identity, as Connolly would say, cannot be foregone. That would be neither desirable nor possible. The desires, capabilities and graces contained within the possibilities of identity are numerous and manifold – the challenge is thus to discover a way in which to enjoy these without succumbing to the desire for fullness and self certainty, and to be open to their potential renegotiations over time. As such, Taylor’s goal to refashion a moral framework for all modern subjectivities and Kymlicka’s idea of a neutral national culture that could subsume all other cultures can be read as stemming from a desire for wholeness, self certainty and ultimately, a social unity that is at the heart of their understanding of society. In the section that follows, I argue that the lack of an apt understanding of the imbricated and mutually constitutive nature of identity and culture presses Kymlicka and Taylor’s frameworks to be overly rigid in that they are unlikely to acknowledge the density, complexity and mutability of contemporary identities. I will also outline the possible difficulties associated with stable and fixed conceptions or understandings of our own identities, specifically the hindrances they present for a meaningful pluralism. Identity as Density and Mutability What I have termed the conceits of Taylor and Kymlicka’s posturing as well as the highly centred manner with which they engage questions of culture tend to persuade me that their implied conceptions of culture are rather fixed and stable. In centre-periphery logic, there can potentially be room for mutability over time and the introduction of new identities; however, any changes that occur in such a system would affect the terms of the periphery, but not that of the centre. As discussed earlier, the nature of the logic of such a system pushes Kymlicka to universalize the premises of a neutral state, while Taylor must back up his moral attunement theory with a transcendental source of one sort or another. If one were to admit to the potential malleability of either of these ‘centres’ by elements in the periphery and thus acknowledge their constitutive interrelationality as in the gay marriage example, then arguably the whole structure of centre-periphery logic would come crashing down. This would be the case since the motivation behind positing a centre ‘term’ in the first place is the aspiration to govern, mobilize or manage all subjects, that is, to find a common grounding susceptible to 45

Bonnie Honig, “My Culture Made Me Do It,” in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, ed. Joshua Lohan and Matthew Howard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 35-40. 39.

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transcend all difference. Taylor is in fact explicit on this point – the only alternative to his model, in his view, is that of atomism, against which he pits his entire endeavour.46 Kymlicka on the other hand admits that there are limits to imposing liberalism’s view of a fundamental autonomy on non-liberal minorities, but he believes that this does not in the least discredit the value of his version of autonomy in grounding states’ actions.47 As such, he does not acknowledge that these dissenting minorities may actually work toward undermining the (selfproclaimed) legitimacy of autonomy as a ‘neutral’ tool for framing his system. The hubris of this posture of centredness, I claim in this section, leads both authors to miss out on one of the focal points of contemporary diversity: its density and complexity. Working toward finding a basis with which to transcend all difference in a diverse society causes both authors to, on the one hand, omit too much in their account of contemporary identity and culture, and on the other, to view politics as operating within boundaries of fixed criteria for establishing what constitutes a legitimate claim to culture. Seen under this lens, it becomes apparent that neither Taylor nor Kymlicka seems ‘thrilled’ about the growing diversities at work in contemporary society; it might even be that they view difference as a negative force from the outset, i.e. as a variable that irredeemably complicates their projects’ viability. For one, views like that of Taylor and Kymlicka’s fail to acknowledge that identity flows beyond distinctions of ethnicity, religion and language and into other, more ‘murky’ and non-traditional categories of identity. These categories are as different and diverse as affinities in the domains of sexuality, sensuality, dietary habits, child-rearing practices, consumption patterns, professional practices to name but a few; in ignoring these, Taylor and Kymlicka’s frameworks for thinking about politics can be interpreted as overly static. It is unclear, for instance, how either would deal with gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual and transvestite identities. Or, more poignantly, how does judging the ‘cultural value’ of lesser-known differences, of types of identities that are new or haven’t even come to be, figure into such frameworks? True, these forms of identity are more difficult to conceptualize, they complicate established parameters of what is and what is not, especially if one’s goal is to formulate governmental policy, but my point is that to ignore them entirely is to miss an altogether more important point: what is precisely challenging about identity/culture today is its complexity and imbrication – its density. Following Connolly then, I am of the view that in order for political theory to remain relevant, it should include an account of – as 46

47

On this point see, for example, “Atomism” in Charles Taylor, Philosophical Papers II, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 187-210. Will Kymlicka, “Two Models of Pluralism and Tolerance,” in Tolerance – An Elusive Virtue, ed. David Heyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 81-105.

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well as give expression to – the inherent messiness and fluidity of contemporary identity dynamics. Beyond their blindness to the density of culture and identity, Taylor’s and Kymlicka’s incapacity to account for new, emerging identities in their account of difference also reveals that their idea of society is one which is closed, bounded more or less by the same people, cultures, identities. Their analyses, in my view, are not inclined to consider the multiplication of identities, the variability of identity over time, even within a given culture, and other changing realities. For example, we should be careful not to overstate the homogeneous nature of even the most established cultural groups; it is a well known fact that tight-knit communities are typically marked by divisions and disagreements. Some cultural groups are notoriously unstable, and many reinvent themselves over time (by changing their conventions, etc.). Moreover, many individuals identify themselves as members of numerous communities at once, even when this involves conflicting implications. The bi- categories here are good examples: identifying as biracial or bisexual in a society that has strong demarcations along these lines, or having a dual citizenship in two ‘enemy countries.’ These hybrid identities, which are arguably becoming more and more prevalent, have often been labeled as illegitimate due to the transgressions that they imply within identity/difference dynamics. How can someone feel an affinity to both the English speaking and francophone cultures within Canada while traditionally, the differences between the two are what defined each group? Though trickier to define, such hybrid identities are a reality for many. As such, I would like to suggest, in line with Connolly’s notion of deep pluralism that an accurate and up-to-date account of what constitutes community must strive to include so-called non-traditional categories of affinity. Moreover, these sets of ‘identities’ are not mutually exclusive; in fact, the point is that any one person can be a member of multiple communities at any one time. And though the attachment and loyalty to our constituencies may differ greatly in degree (for instance, my belonging to a linguistic minority has more impact on my life than my vegetarian lifestyle), Connolly would caution us not to ignore the role of these so-called ‘minor constituencies,’ as banal as some of them may seem for one can never know ahead of time which new cultural group will instigate major rifts in the constellation of established identities. Hence, intersubjectivity in this view is not only limited to how we negotiate our identity and personhood within a given community of individuals, but is also about how we negotiate our diverse sets of affinities, identifying dispositions and sensibilities within ourselves and over time. Ultimately, my point here is to show that an understanding more appropriate to the density and mutability of contemporary identity would view difference not as a fixed set of criteria or cultural

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borders, but as a process of pluralization (the outcome of which is not completely discernible). A Thicker Engagement with Difference? According to the view defended here, political theory must come to terms with the inescapable fact of difference and diversity if it wants to take difference seriously, that is, as the point of departure for thinking about politics. As such, difference is not something we need to accommodate, or a problem to be solved, so much as the very stuff of contemporary human societies. Moreover, given current global trends, it does not seem as though this fact is about to change in the near future. The dense interlayered nature of identity as constituted through difference means that goals of social unity must be significantly attenuated, and that no one moral authority (even under the cloak of being not moral but political) can aspire to govern all subjects. Moreover, a closer, more attentive and selfreflexive engagement with questions of difference will thus reveal that tolerance as a political discourse is not the ‘catch-all solution’ to diversity as touted by liberalism and communitarianism alike. In fact, the ‘solution’ approach is itself a symptom of the desire to manage the threat that difference poses for the upholding of paternalistic centre-periphery models. If we do not pause to critically assess this negative disposition toward difference in our modes of thinking and doing, we may ultimately leave ourselves vulnerable to extremisms, fundamentalisms, resentments and drives to revenge if and when our models of explanation no longer fit the bill of contemporary landscapes and thus succumb to external critiques arising from new, unexpected constituencies for which we cannot account. We will do well, furthermore, to begin to think about how collective action can proceed in such a (necessarily) decentred framework. The atomism  communitarianism dichotomy as framed by Taylor is in fact not the only source of alternatives. A good starting point, I believe, is to first acknowledge that the destabilizing effect of having one’s identity put into question or threatened doesn’t always yield the same results. There is, after all, a positive tendency toward pluralization which is observable on many fronts. For instance, according to Connolly, the event of encountering an identity that threatens our own, though potentially eliciting feelings of anxiety and insecurity, can also be taken as evidence of a (Nietzschean type) of abundance or richness of being, of the exhilarating fact of living in a world where there is an abundance of diversity in all things.48 The initial thrill of discovering a new philosopher who 48

See Connolly 2002, 120; Conolly 1999, 54.

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turns your world inside out (though you may decide that she/he is ultimately wrong), or the sexually adventurous roommate whose behaviour makes you delight in questioning the ‘normalcy’ of your own sexuality, are but a few banal examples of the odd and powerful attraction we sometimes feel toward difference. Something in these encounters makes us value the uncanny not as in need of mastery or moral categorization, but rather as proof of the richness of being. Recalling and affirming this richness of diversity in the world at times where we are tempted to want to problematize it in negative ways, can act as a reservoir of positive inspiration from which to generate a more generous and sensitive response.49 An additional step may be to further explore Connolly’s understanding of the political as stemming from a fluid assemblage of minorities, where collective action proceeds from the intersection of interests and minorities, and where each group in society constitutes a minority, thus drawing inspiration and strength from different sources.50 While not necessarily constituting a radical departure from a model like Kymlicka’s, in such a decentred model, “no constituency would be allowed to represent authoritatively the single source from which all others must draw in public life.”51 Collective action would not proceed from any national culture or abstract mode of deliberation/ dialogue and would instead come into being through an assemblage of minorities. Such assemblages would be formed by individuals or groups who share overlapping commitments to each other and to certain political interests, causes, or concerns. Citizenship, then, would be conceived as a more layered and periodic affair than an all or nothing approach to political participation. For instance, whenever and wherever a mode of action, be it political, economical or other, affects you or your constituency (keeping in mind the possibility of being a member of multiple constituencies at one time), you make it your business to be part of that action. Later, at the ‘close’ of this collective action, you retreat into your private life, only to spring into action again when your concerns, interests, or wellbeing are being acted upon in one way or another. By this time, the makeup or even the very terms of your constituency might have changed. And the alliance structure in which your constituency had found itself joined together with other constituencies may have also been amended. These dynamics are clearly already at play in our societies and one may already identify with this model of citizenship; however, I am of the view that political theory need also reflect such fluid modes of action in its frameworks for theorizing culture, community and difference. I believe that in 49

Connolly 2002, 81-82, 120-21. See Connolly 1999. 51 Connolly 1999, 6. For Connolly, the term ‘constituency’ is preferred over community since it is meant to expand the definition of what is considered ‘culture.’ 50

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getting away from the conceits of centred models, we position ourselves in ways that are more open to the denser, layered reality of identity and in doing so we run a lower risk of privileging established identities over new, emergent ones. One question that naturally arises from the concerns highlighted here and which I shall now pose is that of the ‘glue’ of such a society, i.e. what holds things together when our political conceptions significantly problematize the goal of social unity and forego any kind of single, definitive anchor? For Connolly the answer would be a particular sensibility or ethos crafted from diverse materials and deployed in different ways depending on the constituency and context. This ethos would inspire individuals in diverse ways and would “draw [its] strength from its lack of purity,”52 meaning its contestability. One of the stronger premises of such a view states that “we do not need external or certain foundations to act ethically [and that] the dissolution of foundations does not automatically dissolve ethics: it does so only for those who cannot be ethical without being ordered to do so.”53 It may be that future generations, driven by media such as the Internet, will come to conceive of their citizenship as more deeply layered and enmeshed. But whatever one may think of the viability of such a vision of a decentred pluralism, the challenge of updating and redefining the liberal and communitarian notions of what constitutes a political community is well warranted.

52 53

Ibid. 160. Ibid. 55.

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Multiculturalism and Colonial Continuity: The Function of Disgust in the Politics of Recognition Andreas Krebs

In us, consciousness is slow and linear; parallel processing is reserved for virtual memory prior to consciousness…But because our operational capacities are limited in these ways, it is wise for us from time to time to dissect the elements that make up the organization of perception – when, for instance, we are confronted with the cruel effects our perceptual habits have on those marginalized or demonized by them.1 Snaking up an as yet unnamed river somewhere in the jungles of the New World, Don Lope de Aguirre, self proclaimed Wrath of God, has set his indomitable will on the search for El Dorado, the legendary city of gold. Although Aguirre shows little interest in the indigenous population except for the value they provide in helping him fulfill his goal, for Brother Gaspar de Carvajal the savages in the jungle are of special interest. As the missionary accompanying the expedition, he has been charged with spreading the word of God amongst the Indians. Brother Carvajal, however, shows nothing but rage, disdain, contempt and disgust towards the naked savages. In one brief encounter, an Indian who has approached the raft of the conquistadors defiles the bible which Brother Carvajal has presented to him; in response, the monk runs him through with his sword. Earlier, immediately after we see an Indian lying dead at the side of the trail, Brother Carvajal relates to us that “Our Indian slaves are useless. The changing climate kills them off like flies…most of them die of colds.” In viewing scenes such as this from Werner Herzog’s film Aguirre: The Wrath of God we can be overcome by disgust at the brutal savagery displayed by the Europeans in the jungle; indeed, this is likely one of the themes that Herzog meant to bring out, especially in his juxtaposition of the term savage used by the conquistadors in reference to the inhabitants of the jungle, and the horrific violence of which the conquistadors are shown to be capable. But how could 1

William Connolly, Neuropolitics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 29.

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Brother Carvajal show such disgust towards the Indians whose souls he has been charged with saving? And how is it that we, ostensibly the inheritors of the world which the conquistadors set about to fashion, feel disgust directed at their savage actions instead of at those that they identify as savage? This disparity in the actions of the conquistadors and our reactions to them gives us2 distance from them. The disgust we feel at their actions allows us to tell ourselves that they are not us, and that their actions are despicable. It reaffirms our moral system, and our place in it, through gut reactions to those things which we consciously view as terrible or wrong. However, films like Aguirre hold us in their sway; that which disgusts us also attracts us. The colonial encounter, radical difference laid bare, Brother Carvajal’s abject, random violence – all are enthralling. This ambivalence in disgust is important, and may lead to a better understanding of not only our personal reactions, but how those reactions are informed, how they fit within the larger social and political milieu. The public, and rather popular, philosophy of multiculturalism provides a useful basis from which to examine how affective responses, here specifically disgust, relate to social and political realities. Grounded in popular application of Hegelian philosophy of recognition, this has manifested itself in the official policy of multiculturalism, the recognition of the specific rights of francophones and Aboriginal peoples in the Canadian constitution, and numerous academic works by influential scholars such as Charles Taylor, James Tully and Will Kymlicka. Multiculturalism presents itself as a break from a previous public and state philosophy dominated by a colonial mentality with the ultimate goal of assimilating Aboriginal peoples, francophones, and non-British immigrants into what has 3 been called an Anglo-Celtic national character. So, just as we demonstrate our break with the horrors worked by those who have direct historical implication in the construction of our social universe through our reactions of disgust to the brutality in Aguirre, we also make a break with the more immediate past of colonial policies in favour of our newly internalized norms of mutual recognition. Rather than destruction of the Other, either through running him through with a sword or assimilating him to the dominant culture, we recognize and affirm difference. Past errors issuing from colonialism, such as the atrocities committed in residential schools, must have been exceptions to the rule of generosity that has reappeared and marks our current political and social landscape. Just as, under Herzog’s masterful direction, we seem to be 2

The use of the inclusive, plural first person in this paper is meant to draw together those in the EuroCanadian mainstream, specifically in relation to the effect that the official policy of multiculturalism – in place since the early 1970s – has had on the Canadian polity. 3 See Hugh Shewell, ‘Enough to keep them alive:’ Indian welfare in Canada, 1873-1965 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

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witnessing a nightmare unfolding on the river in Aguirre, so mistakes in the history of Canada seem distant and dreamlike now that we have entrenched Aboriginal and francophone rights in the Canadian Constitution. My contention in this paper is that the widely held view of the politics of recognition as a break with the colonial past is mistaken; instead, despite many aspects that mark multiculturalism as a policy working towards pluralism and respect in Canadian society, both the multicultural policy and its philosophical grounding in the politics of recognition should be seen as having a marked continuity with the social and political relations institutionalized in Canada’s colonial history. I will attempt to show this continuity through the use of the concept of disgust. The following paper is broken into three substantive sections. The first outlines a concept of disgust to be mobilized. The second examines historical and popular representations of the colonial encounter. Here I will be attempting to show that through the history of the colonial encounter, from the first contacts between European explorers through to contemporary encounters on the streets of Canadian cities, affective reactions – particularly the reaction of disgust – plays an important role. However, even while disgust remains, the history of colonization has moved toward the ultimate diminution of the threat embodied by the colonized Other through scientific and political control.4 This has meant a diminution in the prevalence and intensity of disgust in the colonial politics. The third and final section argues that the politics of recognition is an end stage in the purification of the Other: through assimilative practices, the Other has been prepared for incorporation into the body politic. This paper contends that the politics of recognition allows diversity a functional role in the body politic, but only after the stench of difference has been hosed off. However, even then the political territory available to the sanitized Other is strictly delimited. Political action not immediately referring to the state’s hierarchically organized process of recognition threatens the structures which bring comfort to the dominant society and preserve their view of the world. These kinds of actions may trigger unease, disdain, and in extreme cases disgust in the wider society. The newfound respect for difference inculcated through the politics of recognition is quickly forgotten in favour of burning effigies of Indians (in response to the events at Oka, 1990) or equating Aboriginals with terrorists, another villain capable of bringing on intense and negative affective responses (a technique utilized by the Concerned Citizens of Caledonia).5

4 5

See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). See http://citizensofcaledonia.ca (accessed April 2008).

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Disgust The feeling of disgust is a subjective response associated with a number of physiological symptoms: roiling of the gut, terror, nausea, in extreme cases even vomiting. The immediate reaction upon feeling disgust is to escape from, expel, or destroy that which is provoking the disgust. However, this feeling – as indicated explicitly by the example of Brother Carvajal in the introduction – is not completely reducible to the subjective. Although some argue that there exist essentially disgusting things in the world, or at least things that are universally held as disgusting by human cultures,6 the majority of circumstances that we find disgusting are heavily informed by cultural codification. It is also the case, again made clearer by the example of feeling disgusted by the actions of Brother Carvajal, that disgust often intersects with moral judgments – it is not simply an aversion to certain kinds of biological material. Disgust allows for a moral judgment to be made without a conscious reflection. So disgust is at once a simple, gut response to something, and a complex response that is informed by the reciprocal relationship between social structures and individual experience; in fact, the response of disgust can help us to understand much about these social structures. The following section will outline a working definition of disgust to be mobilized for the purposes of this paper. The conception of disgust elaborated here has three basic elements: first, it is affective, meaning that it involves a pre- or subconscious and physiological reaction; second, it is ambivalent – the revulsion that we feel is accompanied, subconsciously or not, by an attraction to the object of disgust; third, disgust is a response to some kind of threat. Affect The most basic element of disgust is revulsion or aversion. The revulsion of disgust is an affective response, locating it somewhere below our consciousness, between subconscious workings of the brain and physiologically based reactions. Freud defined affect as a “physical discharge of a quantity of instinctual energy.”7 This definition, while simple, points to some main structural components of affect: affect is felt, it is bodily, and is often autonomic in excess of con-

6

7

See William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997). Quoted in Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, “Psycho-Marxism and Postcolonial Affect,” South Atlantic Quarterly 97.2 (1998): 341-359. 358n10.

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sciousness.8 Discussing advances in neuroscience and their relation to political theory, William Connolly states that: several neuroscientists conclude that the lower region of the breast, while not as complex as the brain system in the head, houses a simple cortical complex that communicates with the higher brain regions to issue intense feelings of disgust, anxiety, fear, and terror.9

This ‘primitiveness’ of the physiological structures which form part of affective responses, and which allow them to be so immediately and forcefully felt, does not imply that affects are structurally simple. Rather, the point here is that our physiology does not come pre-programmed with disgust inducing triggers. The cortical complexes that Connolly is referring to embody learned cultural codes. Affective responses, such as disgust, allow for the immediate triggering of these cultural codes at a level below conscious control. Brian Massumi refers to this process as the “autonomy of affect,” playing with Kant’s terminology to undermine the modern ideal of the rational individual imbued with the faculty of selfcontrol.10 Ascribing affect as autonomy means that much of our actions and reactions are not consciously reflected upon, but are the result of the encoding of normative structures onto our physiology. Whereas Kant would have us acquire autonomy through self-legislation, Massumi points to the capacity for affect to always short-circuit, and perhaps pre-configure, such self-legislation. Ambivalence Disgust “is inseparable from an intrinsic interest in the object” provoking the disgust.11 For Freud, disgust is something that begins to be inculcated during toilet training; prior to the infant being taught to revile her own feces, she sees defecating as a creative process. This is a step towards self formation, a distinction of the self from the jumbled mess that makes up the world.12 Thus we can see in this early psychoanalytic treatment how it is that we may develop an ambivalent attitude towards the disgusting; up until a certain point, that which is sup8

Patricia Ticineto Clough, “Introduction,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Clough and Jean Halley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 1-33. 9 Connolly 2002, 82. 10 Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 83-109. 11 Aurel Kolnai, On Disgust (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), 100. 12 Charles Brenner, An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis (Madison: International Universities Press, 1955).

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posed to provoke a feeling of disgust is instead attractive. Freud held that in being taught by their parents that excrement is dirty, repulsive feelings are provoked in the child towards the thing that previously had been a source of creativity and pleasure. This ambivalence is present throughout the literature on disgust, and in various forms. Susan Miller’s conception of disgust, when applied to group behaviour, underlines its ambivalent nature: “the most hated stranger may be close kin to the self.”13 It also fits together with that put forward by William Miller in his recent social-historical and literary study on disgust.14 He claims that disgust, while being triggered by numerous distinct experiences or objects (such as that which he refers to as “life soup,” or the most fecund things in nature), is also importantly hierarchical, and therefore has an intense political significance. For him, disgust always includes a negative evaluation: disgust “presents a nervous claim of right to be free of the dangers imposed by the proximity of the inferior. It is thus an assertion of a claim to superiority that at the same time recognizes the vulnerability of that superiority to the defiling powers of the low.”15 Here again William Miller includes a sense of ambivalence, even if it is presented in more overtly political terms. The claim of superiority is necessarily unstable, since disgust, and the social hierarchies it maintains, are constructed – and no matter your position in the hierarchy, inferiors or superiors who disgust you are also a source of fascination and attraction. Threat The disgusting is that which threatens our bodies, our selves, and our concepts of the way our universe works, in both a social and ontological sense. Mary Douglas’s important work on pollution speaks to this; the polluting is described as that which denies an established order: “where there is dirt there is a system.”16 The polluting, although not always provoking disgust, is an important element in disgust itself. That which is disgusting is that which threatens pollution – to be polluted is to become associated with the pollution, to be defiled or contaminated yourself. Pollution is a broad term and concept – it can refer to corporeal pollution, such as the ingestion of something that is culturally defined as polluting, or social interaction with members of society that are viewed as polluting. Those 13

Susan B. Miller, Disgust: The Gatekeeper Emotion (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 2004), 161. William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997). 15 Ibid. 9. 16 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966), 35. 14

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that are defined as polluting are relegated to marginality and often a lumpen identity – homeless people in Western cultures, or the Dalit (untouchables) in India. For Douglas, the fear of pollution is the fear of a breakdown in the social ordering, fear of the re-identification of the marginal as worthy of attention. Importantly, the ambivalence of the feeling of disgust is reflected in the liminal nature of that which provokes disgust. Susan Miller states that the ‘creatures of the threshold’ are often those which present the greatest threat, and provoke the greatest disgust. Watson argues that the sorcerer of Deleuze and Guattari, the idiosyncratic of Horkheimer and Adorno, or the uncanny strangeness of Kristeva are all both definitely and grotesquely alien, but also familiar – because they are a part of us. “Wherever there is a multiplicity there is ‘an exceptional individual’ or ‘Outsider’.”17 The multiplicity is our very existence, each ‘individual’ being a concatenation of multiple drives, sensations, etc., and cannot claim metaphysical separation from his or her surroundings: “There is no gap between in-here and out-there…there is material continuity. The object is ultimately indiscernible from the sensation.”18 Thus the sorcerer, the Outsider or the exception is, in psychoanalytic terms, a projection of this potential Outsider which resides within our own being. The Outsider cannot remain within the system – he challenges it, and we therefore must push him away and repress our own affinity/recognition towards him, or refashion our conceptions and take him into consideration. Watson’s Outsider corresponds brilliantly with a crosssection of works: Freud’s (1918) taboo, Kristeva’s (1980) abject, Agamben’s (1998) homo sacer.19 Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject is very important here. As with Freud’s concept of the learning of disgust as influencing self-differentiation from the world, the experience of the abject, or that which provokes disgust, hate, or horror, is important in the formation of the self. Its existence both allows for the continued maintenance of the unity of the self, and threatens a breakdown between self and Other. The abject is disgust embodied, whether in Kristeva’s example of the skin sitting on top of a glass of milk,20 or in the miserable inhabitants of the bottom rungs our social orderings. While allowing the formation of our selfhood, the abject later comes into conflict with that self. The abject marks the limits to the heterogeneous self, allowing for self-recognition through visceral reactions to the abject Other, that which is ‘not me.’ Through this reaction, 17

Sean Watson, “The Neurobiology of Sorcery: Deleuze and Guattari’s Brain,” Body and Society 4.4 (1998): 23-45. 42. 18 Ibid. 41. 19 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (New York: Vintage, 1918); Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1980). 20 Kristeva 10.

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Kristeva argues that the self is both constituted and threatened, and the reaction is often that of disgust. This makes for two parallel and interacting concepts of that which disgusts, one that tells a story about the maintenance and protection of the self and one that shows the response as an attempt to maintain socially recognized orderings. The preceding exploration yields an emergent characterization of disgust as an affective response to the abject – that which threatens pollution, which threatens to breach the boundary between the self and Other, that which threatens to break down the symbolic order. Thus disgust is both a defense of the self and of the order in which the self is immersed – its ambivalence both strengthens the order and threatens its upheaval. Disgust is therefore not just protection from pollution or a protection of the self, but also a self-defining process that draws boundaries, which are symbolized by the abject. Disgust is productive. Disgust and the colonial encounter Disgust is one of the primary affective responses by the European to the savage Other in the colonial encounter; the colonizer portrays himself as a symbol of purity and moral righteousness while all around him are the signs of filth and moral backwardness. Tales of cannibalism and incest pepper accounts brought back from the New World, which immediately evince disgust in the Europeans reading or listening to them. The reaction of Brother Carvajal is also telling; his disgust in the savage is enough to goad him towards participation in their destruction rather than their salvation. Thus disgust is an important element of the colonial encounter in both textual accounts and popular representations. It is also one element that marks the continuity from first contact to colonial relations today, allowing for a moral judgment to be made about the Other without the need for conscious reflection. However, even as disgust remains central to the colonial encounter, it is not always immediately apparent. Disgust is response to the marginal, and in a well-ordered colonial society it is a marginal response. This becomes clear as we move through histories of the colonial encounter, approaching the well-ordered colonial society of Canada where the disgustprovoking element is kept in check. This section will explore this continuity and change, how disgust carries through in colonial encounters from ‘first contact’ to contemporary experiences of Aboriginal homelessness in Canadian cities. I want to suggest, following a thread originating with Said, that as Europeans gained control over colonized space, the threat embodied by the abject decreased. Early colonial encounters enveloped the European explorer or colonizer in an abject, threat-bearing me90

dium; this medium is gradually objectified, placed under the control of European science and its threat level is diminished. This is precisely the process whereby Aboriginal people in Canada were dispossessed of their traditional territory and placed on reserves, far from Euro-Canadian population centres; the abject, that which embodies a threat to the symbolic order, was removed, placed under the control of the Canadian state, and its threat was thereby extinguished. I will be drawing on work by a number of authors who examine the relationship between the colonial encounter and European ideological structures, especially Todorov (1985) and Dickason (1997),21 as well as interrogating Freud’s major work on the ‘savage’ Other, Totem and Taboo (1918). I will also be referencing Werner Herzog’s cinematic work dealing with the colonial encounter. The characters in his two films Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo offer excellent material for the exploration of disgust in the colonial encounter.22 The Colonial Encounter The colonial encounter, at its basis, is an encounter with alterity. This alterity is not, however, always acknowledged. As Todorov explains in his discussion of the voyages of Columbus, the colonial encounter either results in a perceived equality of the Other, which allows for assimilation, or a difference of the Other, which requires his inferiority and turns him into a threat. Columbus originally saw the Indians as innocent, pre-cultural, symbolizing in their nakedness humans before the fall from grace and expulsion from paradise. This view is gradually accompanied by another, since Columbus is not only possessed by the principles of proselytization but of material gain. There is a distinction made between innocent, assimilable Indians possessing equality and cannibalistic, bellicose Indians 21

22

Olive Dickason, The Myth of the Savage (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1997); Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1985). A methodological note on the use of film in this context is warranted here: the representations made in film, if successful, accord with our pre-perceptive views on the matter at hand. The ‘authenticity’ of the characters in Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo are not to be measured against so-called objective landmarks – the authenticity only matters in that it corresponds to our view of what such characters in such a situation would think and do. If the film is successful in corresponding with our previous, pre-perceptual (virtual, subconscious, affective, physiological, etc.) structures of association, it is authentic in the only way that matters. This same point is what lies at the heart of work done by those such as Todorov (1985), Dickason (1997), Agamben (1998), and Francis (1992). These authors reconstruct the ambivalent, contradictory representations of the savage/wild man/ Outsider as they (may have) existed. Authentic representations are a fiction, and the stronger the claim to authenticity the more problematic they are likely to be.

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who are inferior and only fit for enslavement. This ambiguity reflects the ambivalence of disgust, and links with how we recognize the Other, to be discussed in the next section in relation to the politics of recognition. Both of these views of the Other lead to and are reinforced by ideological structures that inform the colonial encounter. Representations of Early Encounters The early European discourse on the inhabitants of the Americas (variously labeled Indians, cannibals, savages, etc.), and the encounters which feed into and from this discourse, are marked by disgust. The very terminology used by Europeans in their accounts is informed by disgust: the term savage was used to describe all manner of inhabitants of the New World (as well as inhabitants of other uncivilized places) from an early point up until this century. A savage is something that exists between a man and a beast, he is essentially liminal, and lives such an existence. Columbus’s first voyage was towards India, and initially he labeled the people he found in the Americas ‘Indians’ – however, by the time of his death, he would be referring to them as cannibals, which was the popular classification by that time.23 The practice of eating the flesh of human beings was consistently referred to by Columbus and other explorers; indeed, the term is derived from a word in an indigenous Caribbean language.24 Both Columbus and Amerigo de Vespucci included in their accounts many tales of cannibalism. Interestingly enough, regardless of the insistence on veracity, the belief that the ‘Indians’ were cannibals may have been at least partly the result of the inflexible ontological ‘maps’ which European explorers used during the ‘Age of Discovery’ to navigate through the world around them, both literally and figuratively. Todorov recounts how Columbus was sure that he would find monsters and devils in India, such as men with heads in their chests, or tails, or with the heads of various animals, and although he witnessed none directly, he believed that they were literally all around him, scattered in other islands in the Caribbean. The rigidity of his preconceptions may be the origin of his belief in cannibalism: The Indians utter the word Cariba, designating the (man-eating) inhabitants of the Caribbean islands. Columbus hears Caniba, which is to say, the people of the khan.

23 24

See Dickason. Ibid.

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But he also understands that according to the Indians, these persons have dogs’ heads (from the Spanish cane, ‘dog’) with which, precisely, they eat people.25

Columbus reprimands his discussion partner, since while there is no doubt that men eating men with dog’s heads exist,26 they could not be associated with the khan.27 Cannibalism is a disgusting and fearful practice; in Herzog’s film, when Aguirre and his crew encounter a village that may be inhabited by cannibals, their reaction is fear and repulsion and they proceed to burn it to the ground. As Todorov points out, this shows a strange imperative – the only cure for cannibalism is death. Cannibalism is reviled because of its brutality, but the brutality of the punishment meted out by the Europeans is never questioned. Regardless of whether the Indian is a cannibal, and therefore an inferior Other, or peaceful and perhaps worthy of catechizing, he remains reviled, and is often unceremoniously killed – even in the midst of conversion, as by Brother Carvajal. Vespucci also claimed that the practice of cannibalism extended within the family, with cannibalistic inhabitants of the New World eating their children, wives, fathers, etc.28 This statement overlaps with the belief that incest was rampant among the inhabitants of the New World, arising from an apparent total lack of social structure.29 However, while early explorers and missionaries were disgusted by the apparently incestuous relations among the savages, later, more sophisticated accounts would deny that incest was rampant; Frazer’s early anthropological work, interpreted by Freud in Totem and Taboo, showed how an incest taboo was universal among savages. But even with doubt cast on incestuous relations among members of ‘savage races,’ disgust remained a constitutive element in the colonial encounter and the ideological structures that informed it for centuries beyond the ‘Age of Discovery’.

25

Todorov 30. See Dickason. 27 I am not trying to deny the existence of anthropophagy in the Caribbean; it undoubtedly has existed, and exists in many other cultural contexts; see Beth A. Conklin, “Consuming Images: Representations of Cannibalism on the Amazonian Frontier,” Anthropological Quarterly 70 (2) (1997): 68-78. However, the claims of the early explorers were undoubtedly exaggerated, and these very claims were then used to justify all manner of brutality in the name of civilization. 28 See Dickason. 29 Ibid. 26

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High Modernity: Freud, Frazer and Fitzcarraldo The transition from early encounters to well entrenched colonial structures does not necessarily change the presence of the feeling of disgust towards the colonized Other, but the language and actions seem far more ‘proper’ to our latemodern sensibilities. Freud’s matter-of-fact style of writing, marked by casual reference to the fact that the savages to whom he refers are cannibals, seems far more reasoned than the fantastical accounts of Columbus, Vespucci and others that were literally figments of the late medieval European imagination. It is no longer the savage’s association with devils, or necessarily his cannibalism as such that disgusts us, but the fact that he represents a forgotten stage in the development of civilization – in our own development. In Totem and Taboo, Freud is analyzing the work of Sir James George Frazer, which is an important synthesis and disenchantment of that which the European finds disgusting in the savage. Frazer stands at the headwaters of what has become the academic discipline of anthropology; he was attempting to show, through a crude appropriation of Hegelian developmental history, that human societies move from beliefs structured around magic, to religion, and finally to science.30 Despite the anti-Semitism implicit in Frazer’s work (the three step development mirrors the changes in dominant Occidental religions from Judaism to Catholicism to Protestantism), Freud takes Frazer’s writings as important evidence of how the development of human societies is mirrored in the development of the individual. Freud’s project is highly concerned with incest which is, along with patricide, one of the most fundamental drives of the human (male) individual. What makes Freud intrigued by the writings of Frazer is that the totemic system has a highly developed set of norms which not only work against incest, but against numerous other relations that, Freud claims, represent incest: the savage’s “whole social organization seems to serve this object [avoidance of incest].”31 By itself this social organization doesn’t invoke disgust in European readers, since the savages are behaving in accordance with the reader’s accepted rules. However, the foundations of these structures, and their ritualistic exceptions, are more than enough to inspire revulsion: We must say that these savages are even more sensitive to incest than we, perhaps because they are more subject to temptations than we are, and hence require more extensive protection against it.32 30 31 32

See Douglas. Freud 5. Ibid. 14.

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To hear that these savages hold sacred orgies in which persons of just these forbidden degrees of kinship seek sexual union would seem still more peculiar to us, if we did not prefer to make use of this contradiction to explain the prohibition instead of 33 being astonished by it.

Freud’s modern, scientific style is apparent in his chastising of the reader for the disgust that he must be feeling. The attractive element of disgust is also apparent here; the orgiastic imagery provokes titillation even while the acts being committed are morally condemnable. The savage’s embodiment of the abject, the object of disgust, is further underlined by Freud: “What we can add to the further appreciation of incest dread is the statement that it is a subtle infantile trait and is in striking agreement with the psychic life of the neurotic.”34 This links the intra-cultural abject to the extracultural abject – the neurotic, who sits at the edges of our cultural structure is identified with the savage, who represents the inverse of our cultural structures. Both are dangerous in their liminal states, and both are at various times, and often coincidentally, subjects of colonization: either to violent control (through enslavement or incarceration) or civilization (through proselytization and assimilation or therapeutic techniques). The high modern view seems to be gradually cleansing itself of disgust in the Other; Freud’s comments and style are meant to evoke an ethic of ‘getting over’ disgust, perhaps since disgust in the Other (whether savage or neurotic) could only inhibit treatment/assimilation.35 The Victorian era is one of bravery and chivalry in bringing civilization to dark places. Another of Herzog’s films, Fitzcarraldo, comes to mind, with the powerful imagery of the title character blazing a trail of civilization into the Amazonian jungle through a combination of visual splendor – perched atop his paddlewheeler, always sporting a gleaming white linen suit – and cultural superiority – operatic arias screaming from his gramophone into the stifling jungle.36 But even as Fitzcarraldo presents himself as superior (to both the savage rubber barons around him and the savage Indians in the jungle) through his attempts to bring opera to the jungle, he is not overcome by disgust at the Other, but rather curiosity. Contrast this reaction to that of Brother Carvajal who is 33

Ibid. 16. Ibid. 24. 35 In a similar way, St. Catherine of Siena chastised herself for being disgusted at the wounds she was tending; thus she deliberately drank off a bowl of puss (Douglas). 36 I am of course not the first to remark on Fitzcarraldo in a context of the colonial encounter; Taussig gives an excellent rendering of the film in relation to his own field work in the same region of South America; see Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 34

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overtly disgusted at the filth which surrounds him, evident in his ever-present grimace as though the polluting element of the savage were seeping through his nostrils and inhabiting his soul. Fitzcarraldo’s vision is to build an opera house in the hinterland town of Iquitos, Peru. The only way to finance his dream is follow the path to riches that other men made in the early 20th century rubber boom in the Putumayo region. Having procured a rubber producing swath of land, he must somehow get his paddlewheeler through impassible rapids, and to the river adjoining his territory. His solution is to move his ship overland – over a mountain, actually. And he is ultimately successful in this ludicrous goal, with the help of an army of Indians who believe him to be a god. I want to suggest that Fitzcarraldo’s curiosity is a result of the security that the colonizer feels in a well-ordered colonial society. Although the jungle represents the abject medium, Fitzcarraldo’s very actions are those which will make for its domestication. Fitzcarraldo is never overtly threatened with defilement by the savage; he even embraces the recognition that the savages give him as a god, allowing them to paint his face and often enter his immediate proximity without responding with disgust or fear. His hierarchies of both race and class are always kept intact, with the burly mestizo mechanic constantly castigated and condemned to work in the bowels of the ship. Thus even while he becomes anxious when the mechanic is present in the helm, or when the Indians are found onboard, they are not viewed as an immediate threat, and since their temporary flouting of the hierarchy is all required in order to attain the goal of moving the ship over the mountain, he must control his feelings. Todorov’s characterization of the colonial encounter, indicated above, has bearing here. Rather than immediately viewing the other as different and therefore inferior, representing a potential threat of defilement, Fitzcarraldo views the Indians as equal and therefore assimilable to his goal to move his ship over the mountain. Their difference is assimilated into his pre-conceived hierarchies which centre on race and class. The different responses of Brother Carvajal and Fitzcarraldo to the savage Other can be thought of as representative of different contexts; Brother Carvajal’s very life is under constant threat, while Fitzcarraldo’s hierarchies are well established – he will always inhabit the upper deck of his steamship, which the savages he amiably enslaves are prohibited from entering. However, as different as their responses and contexts are from each other, and from the contemporary situation in Canada and other settler colonies, there is continuity in the cultural ideologies which inhabit and inform them.37

37

Note that Herzog’s representation of the rubber boom in the Putumayo ignores much of the horrendous barbarism committed by Europeans, as documented by Taussig.

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The Colonial Encounter Today I would also like to propose that the colonial encounter, and our perception of it, is important for discussions of current political situations in another respect: it is not something relegated to history. The colonial encounter was never, even with our mythical visions of first contact, an unmitigated experience, on either side. Here I am concerned with the encounter from what has become the dominant perspective. The experience of the historical colonial encounter by those such as Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Vespucci, Columbus, or other Europeans, which brought with it a complex of preconceived notions of the Other from their own mythology, fed back into that mythology through oral and literary accounts made by these explorers. These further influenced later encounters between Europeans and inhabitants of the Americas. The reciprocation between pre-conceived structures regarding what to expect when encountering the Other, and accounts informing these structures resulting from the encounters continues through history. The distinction between self and Other, between, in geographically and temporally specific language, Euro-Canadian and Aboriginal, is informed by these reciprocating encounters and accounts – indeed, the persistence of such categories means that contemporary daily encounters continue as colonial encounters. Although each iteration of the colonial encounter changes the meaning of further encounters, the historical movement from first contact to the contemporary world has kept the repulsive aspect of disgust, and the attendant impulse to re-ordering, rather than evincing significant reflection on the affective response. Although the colonial encounter is no longer accompanied by direct violence in the service of conquest, the point is that the element of disgust that we can see retrospectively through analysis of representations of the past carries through into our own subjectivities. This is not to say that each instance of what I characterize here as the contemporary colonial encounter must evince disgust; however, I’m sure many readers will recognize something of themselves, or of Euro-Canadians they know, whose reactions bear resemblance to what is being described here. As mentioned, disgust in a society where colonialism is well entrenched becomes limited to the marginal and exceptional; since the society’s structures are robust enough, and colonized groups adequately assimilated / marginalized / destroyed, the threat that the abject poses rarely evinces the intense affective response of disgust. However, this is not to say that the colonial encounter, and attendant disgust, are eliminated. As recent as the 1960s, the Brazilian government claimed that the Wari’ Indians were cannibals in attempts to justify their ‘pacification.’ Even while the journalists reporting this news framed their stories “in the language of ethnography and anthropological perspectives of cultural

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relativism,”38 the affective provocation of such claims could never be cushioned by choice of language. Colonial encounters in Canada are less likely to rely on characterization of the colonized Other as cannibal; usually, disgust is provoked at far lesser ‘moral offenses.’ I would like to suggest that encounters with homeless panhandlers on the streets of Canadian cities can be characterized as colonial encounters; with Aboriginal people overrepresented on the streets of urban centres (as well as peripheral urban settings), the disgust that people ‘too lazy to get a job’ often incite becomes racialized. The conservative rhetoric of responsibility which extends to all homeless people, making them objects of disgust, is doubly present with the aboriginal panhandler. As Shewell argues, after the meager allowances distributed during the ‘initial period of subjugation,’ Aboriginal peoples were meant to be self sufficient, even if their reserves were located on non-arable land, their hunting practices were severely limited, and they were given little to no support in taking up their new (forced) occupation as agriculturalists. The inverted argumentation that this represents, with colonized people becoming responsible for the hardships they face through colonialism, is itself disgusting. Posing a threat to the structures that provide comfort and stability, Aboriginal protests such as those which recently took place in Caledonia, Ontario, are also liable to bring a disgusted grimace to the face of many Canadian citizens. Academic discourse in Canada relating to Aboriginal people is not immune to elements that could be interpreted as evoking disgust. The constant reference to the high birthrate among Aboriginals corresponds with William Miller’s assertion that feelings of disgust are responding to “life soup.” The very fecundity of life itself is often the object of disgust; high birthrates amongst Aboriginal people brings to mind cramped, squalid conditions, perhaps other (post)colonial settings such as those in Africa – where, besides the AIDS epidemic and war, high birthrates figure prominently in reportage. If these kinds of links are made, they are often made without the conscious awareness of the individual making them. A certain use of language, while perhaps not disgusting in itself, become disgusting based on the context: the birthrate of Germany will probably be interpreted as a harmless figure by an academic in a colonial setting, while birthrates amongst groups on the margins, colonized or not, may result in a barely noticed twinging in the gut.

38

Conklin 68.

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Disgust and the Politics of Recognition In the last chapter of his study, William Miller analyzes writings of George Orwell in which he recounts spending time with a family whose occupation is the preparation and selling of tripe. Orwell, a noted essayist on the left of the political spectrum, is attempting to enumerate just what it is that keeps the middle class – apart from a few ‘sandal wearing, fruit juice drinkers’ – from taking up the socialist cause. The main reason that the otherwise well-intentioned English middle class cannot take up the plight of the worker is that “the lower classes smell.”39 Orwell contends that the physical repulsion felt by the middle class towards the lower, while admittedly entirely contingent, cannot be overcome by good will alone. The civilizing process that brought the middle class to their position – of not slurping their soup, of bathing (and having access to a bath), and of pronouncing their aitches – must be extended to the lower classes in order to make the cause of socialism more palatable to the middle classes. The desire to civilize the lower classes so that they might have their plight taken up by the middle classes bears a striking resemblance to the drives to assimilation that mark the history (and present) of colonialism in Canada. All that Orwell desires is that the lower classes, in order to warrant sympathy, not be offensive – but this requirement is essentially that of their eradication through alignment with middle class values and modes of being.40 In this section I will argue that the politics of recognition, as most widely presented in both academic and popular discourse, requires that in order to be recognized, cultural groups ‘must not smell.’ This immediately requires a determination of who it is that is doing the smelling, and whether the smeller’s nose can ever be objective, i.e. sniff out essentially disgusting (because immoral) habits in the one being smelled. However, the politics of recognition as it stands in Canada does not only require that cultural groups not smell; it ensures that they are relegated to certain corners of the political landscape so, if the smell should return, they will not offend the sensibilities of the dominant group. This process can be seen as the end result of an institutional response to disgust, to the threat of the abject, which began with dispossession of lands, and continued through creation of reserves far from urban centres, and resulted in the logic that fueled the internment of Aboriginal children in residential schools: assimilation into the dominant 39 40

Quoted in W. Miller 240. Much of the work of Michel Foucault explores the history of the often coercive inculcation of bourgeois norms at the heart of the modern populace (see, among others, Foucault 1972 and 1975 for example). For an excellent foucaldian argument making the process and experience of colonialism central to the formation of bourgeois subjectivity, see Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).

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culture of liberal, English or French speaking society, and abandonment of their ways of living which so marked them as revolting in the view of their colonizers. The politics of recognition has at its bottom two things: the recognition being made must fit within prior parameters defined by the dominant group, i.e. that it be a cognitive rather than a constructive recognition,41 and that once recognized, the colonial Other remain within the political territories staked out by the dominant group. This relegation is a means of maintaining order and diminishing the threat posed by the colonial Other to the sensibilities of the dominant. The first point in relation to the politics of recognition is that regardless of the progressive potential of the project, it carries with it assimilationist tendencies, and can be seen to rely on pre- or subconscious moral intuitions (including disgust) to judge the merit of a demand for recognition. This is evident in two important scholarly works on the subject, Charles Taylor’s essay titled “The Politics of Recognition” (1994), and James Tully’s 1995 book Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity.42 In his discussion of Orwell, William Miller comes to a decision that there are certain things, such as foul body odour, that are essentially disgusting, and that disgust is not responsive to our will: “it installs large chunks of the moral world right at the core of our identity, seamlessly uniting body and soul and thereby giving an irreducible continuity to our characters.”43 Such a perspective is reflected in Taylor’s essay, which argues that the entry into the polity of groups demanding recognition must be justified through a hybridized form of value judgment (a “fusion of horizons”44) informed by scrutiny and study of the Other. Both suppositions are problematic; to posit the essentially disgusting is to deny the fact that many people from the same cultural background have different responses to what ‘should’ disgust them; and to assume that a hybridized value judgment should be at the basis of valuing alterity is to ignore the power of arbitrarily informed affective responses in forming such value judgments. Both assign a cultural superiority to the dominant by making it the perspective from which smelliness or worth of recognition is to be judged. Taylor’s use of recognition is what Patchen Markell dubs cognitive recognition – it follows the etymology of the word, literally re-cognizing new information to fit within prior structures of knowledge and identification. There are a number of problems associated with this take on how recognition works, with an 41

Patchen Markell, “The Recognition of Politics: A Comment on Emcke and Tully,” Constellations 7.4 (2000): 496-506. 42 Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism, ed. Amy Gutman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25-73; James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 43 W. Miller 251. 44 Taylor 67.

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important one being that it has the potential to ossify sub-altern identities that are already rooted in oppression. In relation to affect and disgust, those aspects of the target of recognition that are not re-cognizable are definitionally alien, and pose a threat to self-supporting structures. Without a conscious attempt to understand how affective reactions inform judgments, Others who have traits that do not fit within pre-conceived structures are doomed to moral condemnation by cognitive recognition. Only those cultural aspects that either do not smell, or have been thoroughly sanitized through the process of colonialism, could ever be recognized given Taylor’s requirements. Tully’s work in Strange Multiplicity is a noble attempt to incorporate constructive recognition – one that is aware that identity is mutually constructed45 – into the politics of recognition, with the goal of evading many of the problems that accompany Taylor’s approach. His approach is modest, respectful, and selfreflexive; in interpreting Bill Reid’s sculpture The Spirit of Haida Gwaii,46 in which a variety of creatures from Haida mythology are all paddling together in a canoe, Tully asks How can a non-Aboriginal person, after centuries of appropriation and destruction of Indigenous civilizations, free himself or herself from deeply ingrained, imperious habits of thought and behaviour and approach this symbol in the appropriate way?47

Tully’s answer is a form of constitutionalism which uses Bill Reid’s sculpture as a model of communication. Tully argues that even while modern constitutional theory, whether republican or liberal, is able to ‘choose’ tolerance of diversity in the mythical foundation of the state, the founding moment must already work against such a principle due to the uniformity and universality of the law and constitution. Thus he wants to explore a different kind of constitutionalism that takes as its basis early European-Aboriginal contact and common law rulings in Canada. Using Bill Reid’s sculpture of The Spirit of Haida Gwaii as a model, in which a variety of different beings are all in one boat, sharing the cramped space with an elegant sense of balance, Tully puts forward a theory of constitutional communication. This communication is premised not on Habermas’s ideal speech situation, but on a form of communication that is always imperfect, based in the history of contact between Europeans and Aboriginals in Canada. Through an exploration of this contact, three constitutional conventions emerge: mutual recognition, continuity and consent. The values which are expressed through this 45 46 47

See Markell. The original casting of which sits at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC. Tully 19.

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communication have no prior universality; they have not been agreed to in some imaginary constitutional convention. Rather, they are constantly being discussed and reformulated. The issue with Tully’s argument that I want to highlight is the role of the Chief in Reid’s sculpture, who occupies a central position in the canoe. He acts as interlocutor, and ultimately judge of the demands of the other passengers; here we have a hub and spoke model of communication, whereby communication between the other passengers is routed through an apparently indifferent arbitrator – the state. The centrality of the state, which in the Canadian context remains a colonial state, denies the potential of an objective interlocutor (if such objectivity were ever possible). While the Chief is meant to be sensitive to the competing claims of the other passengers on the canoe, and to know their history, the Chief himself must have an identity, a history, and a role in this history. This history itself is also not merely one of a number of equally weighted claims, but of conquest and disruption of some passengers’ cultural practices, economic systems, and general way of life. Tully’s constitutionalism as constant accommodation is an accommodation by a specific central identity to the demands of certain marginal identities; his obfuscation of the identity of the Chief/state is relatively transparent – the Canadian state is a colonial one, and comes pre-loaded with a colonial perspective – privileging Euro-Canadian values and ways of life – which it uses to judge the nature of accommodation to be given. Cognitive recognition thus re-enters the picture, even after Tully’s sensitive framing. This cognitive recognition sets the initial requirements for the inclusion of the Other in the polity. But once recognized, the Other must stick to the regulations governing that recognition: “demands for cultural recognition are aspirations for appropriate forms of self-government.”48 The judge of what forms of self-government is, of course, the colonial state. These regulations work to maintain the marginality of the colonized Other within a colonial state/society. This two pronged approach to recognition and regulation is directly reflected in the enfranchisement rules for status Indians in Canada which existed prior to 1960. Upon joining the clergy or completing university (or upon request, given good moral and financial standing), a status Indian would lose his legal status and become a Canadian citizen. There are two things to note here: first, if an individual was defined legally as an Indian, she was kept at the margins of Canadian society through both lack of suffrage and confinement to a reserve; second, the requirements (beyond the loose definition of moral and financial ‘standing’) for enfranchisement actually placed the former Indian in a class above the majority

48

Tully 4; emphasis added.

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of Canadian citizens. A university education prior to 1960 was not so widely sought after or attainable as it is today. The practice of enfranchisement, ostensibly aimed at helping Aboriginal peoples move towards the goal of civilization (as represented by the dominant English speaking, Protestant Canadian culture), ended in 1960 when status Indians were ‘given’ the right to vote in federal elections. With this, they gained the right to be different from the dominant while enjoying rights of political participation; but as Todorov states, the colonial situation is either of equality and assimilation or difference and inferiority. In the decades intervening between 1960 and today, rights specifically available to Aboriginal peoples have increasingly been recognized by the state. This has coincided with an increase in the capacity for Aboriginals to be (cognitively) recognized by the dominant through the increasing numbers of Aboriginal lawyers, the increasing capacity of Aboriginal politicians to articulate themselves in the colonial language, even the presence of Aboriginal actors on television. The Aboriginal that is in closest communicative contact with the institutions of colonial power no longer smells. However, he will always remain an Aboriginal, and the threat of breaking out of his constitutionally regulated place is always lurking. The process of multicultural education promotes a tolerance of Others which relies upon an essential difference49 which is rooted, most often, in race. If Aboriginal people do not remain within the bounds of the political territory staked out by the constitutional processes  communicating with the state through treaty processes, legal proceedings, or government interlocutors  they threaten the dominant political, social and cultural structures. This threat is immediately perceived by the dominant population; normally respectful citizens, who have had ‘Indians’ as good neighbours for years, begin to make claims that begin with ‘I am not a racist, but…’ Conservative talk radio stations foment myths surrounding lucrative monthly disbursements available to all ‘Indians,’ fanning the embers of disgust that free-loading must evoke in our society of hard-working, self-made men. In order to maintain order, and perhaps to prevent vigilante justice, the offending ‘Indians’ are dealt with by the government through the use of force, and although those responsible for upsetting the order are unlikely to serve lengthy jail sentences, their place in the order has been restored. The blockade of a major highway and a number of rail lines in Ontario in the summer of 2007 by Mohawk activist Shawn Brant and the reactions by media and official Aboriginal political groups followed this model. The actions were met with outrage amongst the dominant group, with always-simmering 49

See Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

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colonial attitude among the Euro-Canadian mainstream bubbling forth in accusations of indolence and special treatment of Canada’s ‘natives’ immediately (and predictably) in talk radio, blogs, and reader comments on mainstream media websites. Additionally, the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) was very vocal about distancing itself from the actions of Brant and the other protesters, which could have affected the standing of the AFN in public opinion.50 While the reactions to the protest demonstrated that negative affects including resentment, rage, and disgust are always ready to bubble to the surface when the colonized acts outside of the strictly demarcated territory recognized as legitimate by the Canadian state, those organizations which populate that territory, including the AFN, also work to ensure both that they are not associated with boundary crossing behaviour, and that they maintain their ‘cleanliness’ in the view of the Canadian mainstream by distancing themselves from such behaviour. This event, and the broader trend that it marks, serves to undermine the respect for difference that is meant to motivate the politics of recognition. It demonstrates both the grip that colonialism continues to have on ostensibly postcolonial institutions such as the AFN, and the capacity for the Canadian public to ‘revert’ to a mindset which should be, with the official adoption of multiculturalism and the popularity of the politics of recognition, a thing of the past. Although she is directly referring to the ritualistic burying alive of a (consenting) human being among the Dinka, the following quote from Mary Douglas serves as an excellent characterization of how the politics of recognition function in official politics, academics, and popular discourse in Canada: “By ritual and speech what has passed is restated so that what ought to have been prevails over what was, permanent good intention prevails over temporary aberration.”51 The repatriation of the constitution in 1982, and the view among many of the ‘Charter generation’ that absolute justice rains down in the form of Supreme Court decisions referencing that constitution, allows for a popular feeling of satisfaction and moral rectitude. Now that the constitution has been wrought with the Canadian values of generosity and recognition of the rights of minorities, the colonial past can be forgotten as if it were a bad dream – it is dead and buried. But as I hope to have shown in this section, the break with colonialism that the politics of recognition is supposed to represent is partial at best; through cognitive recognition of the Other, the politics of recognition fits that Other into a regulated hierarchy, the beginnings of which can be seen in the views of the first Europeans to interact with the Indigenous inhabitants of what would become the Americas. Attempts to escape this hierarchy by the colonial Other can pose a 50

51

CBC 2007, “Aboriginal day of action unfolds peacefully,” http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/ 2007/06/29/aboriginal-action.html. Douglas 67.

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threat to the sense of self for those in the dominant position, who may consequently lash out at the abject in an attempt to maintain the social structures that ensure their moral and physical comfort. These hierarchies, and the reactions that accompany their being threatened, are thoroughly infused with disgust. Recognition of a sanitized, assimilated Other and the placing of him into an allocated slot is a convenient way to evade the disgust that his existence may elicit. It is also continuous in many ways with previous colonial practices that the proponents of the politics of recognition themselves find disgusting. Conclusion – Ambivalence and Reflection Disgust, as presented here, plays an important role in the unconscious continuation of colonial structures which work to both assimilate and marginalize Otherness. In allowing for a moral judgment without requiring recourse to conscious reflection, it allows immediate responses to situations that may have been open to interpretation. Disgust is rampant in representations of the Other; this immediately allows justification of colonial practices, whether they be salvation through assimilation or punishment through slavery. Both are appropriate as responses to the disgusting – one purifies to make the Other acceptable to our sensibilities, the other destroys him and whatever threat he may have posed. Importantly, this revulsion at the Other informs the very institutions that are meant to break with the response; the politics of recognition, like assimilation or destruction, reorders the universe and renders the Other harmless. The requirement of re-cognizance of aspects of the Other that correspond with dominant sensibilities – that he not ‘smell’ – is accompanied by the clearing of a political terrain for him that ensures that his prior disgust inducing habits will be strictly circumscribed. Any indication that he does not accept this position reminds the dominant that the Other’s essence remains defiling, and the response is again one that aims at fortifying the structures that comfort the dominant – the response of disgust allows for an immediate degradation of the Other to something outside the moral horizons. Brutal actions by police forces are overtly justified in reference to the maintenance of order. The order is of course one of colonially developed hierarchies that equate difference with inferiority and continue to validate negative affective reactions to such difference. The ambivalent nature of disgust has been given little attention in much of the preceding discussion; from a behaviouralist perspective, this ambivalence is seldom obvious in reactions of disgust. Perhaps it is the increasingly tenuous nature of colonial structures that is responsible for this; conscious reflection on the disgust felt at the colonial Other threatens the privileged position of the 105

dominant. Perhaps he suspects that the structures which allow for his position are in reality out of line with the publicly conceded ones of equality and fairness. However, to entertain such fleeting sensations with conscious reflection would be to threaten his position, the ideas and ideals which he has internalized over the course of his lifetime. Thus the attraction to the abject object of disgust must be repressed in favour of its expulsion or destruction. The ambivalence present in disgust has, in the terms presented by William Connolly, the potential to trigger a crisis of faith. When your faith is disturbed your being is rattled. You react bodily through the roiling of your gut, the hunching of your shoulders, the pursing of your lips, and the tightening of your skin. The visceral dimension of faith, moreover, bubbles into explicit belief, affecting the intensity with which you respond to debates about elemental questions.52

But this immediate reaction does not necessarily foreclose the possibility of conscious reflection on that which triggered it: “a crisis of faith might lead you to adopt exercises to modify the visceral register of faith.”53 This is the ultimate point of what has been presented here: instead of relishing negative affective responses and fuelling accompanying feelings of moral outrage and superiority, responses of disgust to the practices of the Other should be interrogated consciously. Of course such thoughtful analysis is at the foundation of the politics of recognition; the aim of this paper is to push this foundation further, and allow for a constant renegotiation of the basis for the Canadian polity. In this way Tully’s finely articulated vision and the one underlying the critical approach of this paper are united. Understanding and acknowledging the continuity that politics of recognition has with the past colonialist practices that disgust us here and now allows for further problematizing of what we deem as morally and politically acceptable. This is the positive role that ambivalence can play in experiences of disgust: techniques which allow for reflection on the visceral register are those that allow for a move away from cognitive recognition and attendant maintenance of colonial hierarchies and towards an affirmation and acceptance of radical difference.

52 53

William Connolly, Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 26. Ibid.

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Defining the Quebec Nation: Ten Years of Debates and an Emerging Consensus Simon Langlois

Defining the nation in Quebec has been the subject of heated debates since the 1990s. History will certainly see this period as politically interesting as lively debates have taken place to self-define Quebec society. The national question took a new turn when the Bourassa Government negotiated the Meech Lake Accord (rejected in 1990) wherein Quebec was referred to as a ‘distinct society.’ Later - and more so after the 1995 Referendum - the question of Quebec’s nationhood came once again to the forefront. Jacques Parizeau’s reference to “money and some ethnic votes”1 as the main causes of the defeat of the sovereigntists’ option and his use of “we, Quebeckers” raised many questions on the night of October 30th 1995. Who exactly were the ‘we’ so often used not only by the Parti Québécois but also in many milieus of the Quebec society? The present interest in defining the Quebec nation is linked to endogenous social and cultural changes that took place not only in Quebec, but also in English Canada – where a ‘Canadian nation’ building is also ongoing – and in French Canada outside Quebec where endogenous changes were also at work.2 It is Quebec’s language legislation voted in the 1970s and other measures taken to integrate immigrants into the French-speaking majority that implied a process of ‘refounding’ the nation. Immigration has made Quebec schools more ethnically and religiously diverse (especially in the Montreal area), a phenomenon that incurred the restructuring of the system on a linguistic rather than a religious basis in the 1990s. Compared to Canada, Quebec has only lately begun to question its new identity which takes into account immigration and cultural diversity. There are strong disagreements in the very definition of the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘national identities’ not only in Quebec but elsewhere in the world. Changes on the international scene, globalization and free-trade, the development of the European Union towards a greater integration of its composing na1

2

Contrary to what has been written repeatedly in the press, Jacques Parizeau actually said “money and some ethnic votes” and not “money and the ethnic vote”. The meaning of each of these expressions is radically different (See: http://www.uni.ca/argent_ethniques.html). (accessed August 2009). Simon Langlois, “Canadian Identity: A Francophone Perspective,” in Encyclopedia of Canada's People, ed. P. Robert Magocsi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 323-329.

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tions, the end of the communist regimes, and ethnic confrontations as seen in such places as ex-Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union or in Africa have also brought about a world-wide debate on the question of nationhood, cultural diversity and multiculturalism, and sovereignty of nations. Nations today have many shapes and sizes and it has become perilous, if not impossible, to classify them. Today there is a wide consensus in Quebec on the meaning of the nation québécoise. It is seen as a nation that is being rebuilt on new foundations, in the process of a ‘refoundation’, to refer to the expression used by Fernand Dumont. Charles Taylor describes the same idea when he says that, from time to time, a nation has to realize that the pillars on which it stands have changed. Because nation building is a work in progress it is forever open to debate. When referring to Quebeckers, Quebec’s elder population primarily refer to the FrenchCanadians; for others, the term also includes immigrants and the Englishspeaking community seen as a national minority inside the society.3 The use of the word Québécois – ‘Quebeckers’ in English – became popular as early as the 1960s, but it is only in the mid 1970s that it acquired a wider and more inclusive meaning. A similar change occurred during the 1960s for the word ‘Canadians’ which, after the recognition of multiculturalism in lieu of biculturalism, replaced the hyphenated terms of ‘English-Canadians’ and ‘French-Canadians.’ The average citizen may believe that these debates only cause heated political argument, incomprehensible to some and useless to others. But, in a democratic society, such debates are essential to social cohesion which, in turn, assures the adoption of public policies that are in tune with today’s population. In this presentation, I intend to outline the main debates on the definition of the nation that took place in Quebec during the 1990s and 2000s. I will consider the consensual elements and examine their pros and cons. I will then look at a few pending questions such as the status of the English-speaking community and that of the Quebec’s Amerindians. The Refoundation of the nation In a context of re-assessing past traditions, charters of rights and freedoms, and diversity of belongings and origins, the question of symbolic integration has become important in contemporary societies characterized by relativism and pluralism.4 One should not believe that identity is the only important issue; other 3

Gary Caldwell and Eric Wadell, Les anglophones du Québec: de majoritaires à minoritaires (Québec: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 1982). 4 Gary Caldwell, “Immigration et nécessité d’une culture publique commune,” L’Action nationale, 78.8 (1988): 705-711; Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority

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social and economic problems are also at stake as they, too, concern collective identity. The opening of borders affects national identity as does legislation that changes relations between the national components inside the state: Canada’s 1968 Official Languages Law, Quebec’s 1978 Charter of the French Language, known as Bill 101, and the 1957 American Civil Rights Act are but a few examples. This type of legislation deeply changes every day life, that of the majority as well as that of the minority, and redefines social relationships as well as the social representation of themselves. Before touching on the subject of Quebec’s nationhood, two observations: firstly on the question of social evolution, secondly on the question of social construction or interpretation. Most scholars share Guy Rocher’s view that “One must not consider a nation as an absolute and universal immovable concept.”5 Each nation has its own history and particularities that transform it over time. Therefore when studying a nation, one must take into account the changes that have occurred from one period to another. Significant changes indicate that there has also been a fundamental change in the very foundations of the nation. Fernand Dumont claimed – in an interview that was published posthumously – that: “States or nations are periodically refounded on new bases, and, incidentally, [in Quebec] it has become necessary to repeat the process, as we did in 1850.”6 Gérard Bouchard has adopted an identical perspective in his essay on the nation in Quebec.7 We will look at his essay in detail later but, for the moment, let us consider two examples: Canada and the United States. The Canadian Confederation united four British colonies and came into being in 1867 but, for French-Canadians, two linguistic groups, the aboriginal communities having no say in the matter at the time, founded the country. Since then millions of immigrants have settled in Canada – between 1945 and 2000 the number of immigrants is equal to that of a country the size of Austria – and First Nations are now seen as an integral part of the country. From these important changes in Canada’s – and Quebec’s – social structure stems a necessary rebuilding process, a refoundation process, and the obligation to re-examine the national question.

Groups (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Denise Helly, “Les transformations de l’idée de nation,” in La nation dans tous ses états, eds., Gérard Bouchard and Yvan Lamonde (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997), 311-336; Denise Helly, “Minorités ethniques et nationales: les débats sur le pluralisme culturel,” L’Année sociologique, Voies nouvelles de la sociologie (special edition, M. Forsé and S. Langlois, eds.) 52.1 (2002): 147-181. 5 Guy Rocher, “Des intellectuels à la recherche d’une nation québécoise,” in Penser la nation québécoise, ed. Michel Venne (Montréal: Québec-Amérique, 2000), 283-296. 289. 6 Fernand Dumont, Un témoin de l'homme. Entretiens (Montréal, L'Hexagone, 2000), 56. 7 Gérard Bouchard, La nation québécoise au futur et au passé (Montréal: VLB, 1999).

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Such a process has also been ongoing in the United States ever since the Pilgrims settled in Plymouth in 1620. Michael Lind identifies four different regimes: 1) English-America, 2) European-America, 3) multicultural America, and 4) transracial cultural8 America which is in the process of coming of age at the turn of the 21th Century. According to Lind, this last emerging regime will be able to counter what he considers the negative effects of multiculturalism prevalent in Canada. He states that, finally the United States can claim to be a monocultural ethnic nation. “If ethnicity can be defined by language and culture, there is a multiracial and a multireligious but unicultural American ethnic nation. We might speak without contradiction, of the ethnic American”.9 His way of seeing things is quite surprising as it is contrary to most previous definitions of the United States. According to Lind, the English language is the first and foremost cultural element; popular culture, traditions, history, shared values, and a sense of belonging to a unique economic and social system are secondary elements. The nation’s culture has been built over the years and has integrated several cultural elements taken from the various groups – including Blacks and Hispanics – that have shaped today’s America; it is no longer the white AngloSaxon protestant society of the Founding Fathers. The cultural majority in America is larger than the white racial majority, he stated. If he is correct, the American example proves that a multicultural and diversified nation can also become a unified cultural nation. The idea that the United States forms but one nation is widespread amongst its political analysts10 even if, in other countries, it is perceived as being heterogeneous. There are many types of nations in the world. Each has its own particularities which stem not only from its past but also from its relations to its neighbours. For example, Scotland is proud of its sport teams that compete on an international level, it has its own symbols on currencies and is recognized as one of the nations that form Great Britain, and Scotland has recently elected its own Parliament, but with limited powers. The situation is quite different in Quebec; on the one hand it is not officially recognized as a nation within Canada but, on the other hand, its well established Parliament controls many political levers. Some scholars upheld that there is a difference between Western and Eastern nationalisms, the first gives rise to democratic, rational, and liberal entities, the second, to non-democratic, racist, and reactionary entities.11 8

Michael Lind, The Next American Nation. The New Nationalism and the Next American Revolution (New York: The Free Press, 1995). 9 Ibid. 274. 10 See John A. Hall and Charles Lindholm, Is America Breaking Apart? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 11 Miroslav Hroch, “Historical Aspects of Nationalism: the West,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, dir. Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Bates (New York: Elsevier,

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As for the question of social construction or interpretation, particularly important in periods of national refoundation is the fact that a nation can be perceived in many ways and, consequently, there can be several conflicting interpretations. Fernand Dumont has discussed this topic at length in his works and has defined the nation as a reference entity – a national reference – an interpretation that is very close to that of Benedict Anderson who sees the nation as an imagined community. Over the years, Dumont mapped out ways of building national reference claiming that history, literature, and ideologies – and today one might add the media – contribute to build a common representation of a community. They are shared markers of a particular universe that are specific to each nation. These references belong to the whole of a particular society, they do not only concern one or several individuals as do other markers such as age, gender, profession, and social class.12 A nation is more than the sum of its differences and individual identities, a nation integrates horizontally in spite of its many vertical divisions like social classes or internal divisions along gender or regions.13 A cultural versus a civic nation: an outdated debate If at first glance there appears to be several ways of defining a nation, essentially there are only two, all others being variations on the same themes.14 The first type of nation is often seen as cultural, that is defined by its cultural aspects: generally a common origin, ethnic background, and way of living. From this perspective the nation’s territory does not necessarily match that of the state as it does in Japan for example. At the turn of the 20th Century, the heart of French Canada was Quebec but it had offspring not only in Ontario, Manitoba and the Northwest Territories, but also in New England.15 French Canada was then perceived as a cultural nation, defined as an historical community, the latter seeming more accurate as it avoids confusion with what is known as an “ethnic nation.”16 2001), 10357-10365; L. L. Snyder, The Meaning of Nationalism (New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University Press, 1954). 12 For the Study of the relation between gender and nation, see Diane Lamoureaux, L’Amère patrie. Entre féminisme et nationalisme (Montréal: Editions du Remue Ménage, 2001). 13 Philippe Gerrans, “La localisation du nationalisme,” in Les nationalismes, ed. Bernard Baertschi and Kevin Mulligan (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2002), 13-28. 14 Bernard Beartschi and Kevin Mulligan, eds., Les nationalismes (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2002). 15 Yves Roby, Les Franco-Américains de la Nouvelle-Angleterre (Québec: Septentrion, 2001). 16 Yvan Lamonde, Allégeances et dépendances. L’histoire d’une ambivalence identitaire (Québec: Nota bene, 2001).

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The second type of nation – the political nation – is one based on citizenship and civil rights. This type is the most common and we will return to this aspect further on. Be it a cultural or a political nation, the difference is purely theoretical as no nation corresponds exactly to one model or the other. Nations are complex and varied entities. To compare an ethnic nation and a civic nation as if they were two separate social entities is irrelevant because each corresponds to Weber’s ideal types or models that then serve as a framework to study specific nations.17 Let us now apply these two basic models to Quebec. Quebec as an historical nation Fernand Dumont, a well-known sociologist who passed away in 1996, published many books and articles on the subject of Quebec’s nationhood.18 He was very influential in his time but, since the 1990s, his thoughts have been criticized, often quite harshly. He seems to have sometimes been misunderstood and, even today, his theories are the subject of many debates amongst Quebec’s scholars and intellectuals.19 But what remains of Dumont’s thinking today? Dumont approached nationhood from three interrelated perspectives that have not always been differentiated by his critics: theoretical, historical, and normative. His theoretical perspective is still valid, but his definition of Quebec as an historical entity must be reviewed because, like all contemporary societies, Quebec has changed. For Dumont nations are built on their past and collective mem17

18

19

Gilles Bourque, “Le discours sur la nation,” Recherches sociographiques 38.3 (1997): 532-536; Gilles Bourque, “Entre nation et société,” in Penser la nation québécoise, ed. Michel Venne Coll.: Débats (Montréal: Québec-Amérique, 2000), 165-188; Kai Nielson, “Un nationalisme culturel, ni ethnique ni civique” in Le pays de tous les Québécois. Diversité culturelle et souveraineté, ed. Michel Sarra-Bournet (Montréal: VLB éditeur, 1998), 143-159. Fernand Harvey, “Construire la référence : Québec et le Canada français selon Fernand Dumont,” in Valeurs et société. Références politiques et références culturelles au Canada, ed. Claude Sorbets and Jean-Pierre Augustin (Bordeaux: Maison des sciences de l’Homme de l’Aquitaine, 2001), 151-168; Jean-Philippe Warren, “L’état de la nation,” Bulletin d’histoire politique. Présence et pertinence de Fernand Dumont 9.1 (2000): 60-70; Serge Cantin, “Nation et mémoire chez Fernand Dumont. Pour répondre à Gérard Bouchard,” Bulletin d’histoire politique Special edition: Présence et pertinence de Fernand Dumont 9.1 (2000): 40-59. Guy Laforest, “Identité et pluralisme libéral au Québec,” in Identité et cultures nationales. L’Amérique française en mutation, dir. Simon Langlois. Coll. Culture française d’Amérique (Sainte-Foy: Les presses de l’Université Laval, 1995), 313-327; Geneviève Mathieu, Qui est Québécois? Synthèse du débat sur la redéfinition de la nation (Montréal: VLB éditeur; Harvey, 2001); Jacques Beauchemin, “Le sujet politique québécois: l’indicible ‘nous’,” in Repères en mutation. Identité et citoyenneté dans le Québec contemporain, ed. Jocelyn Maclure and Alain-G. Gagnon. Coll.: Débats (Montréal: Québec-Amérique, 2001), 205-225.

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ory.20 Never does he speak of Quebec as a civic or an ethnic nation – that is a nation based on rights or a common culture – which he saw as being too abstract in the first case and of another nature in the second case. Dumont’s nation was first and foremost an historical community. A nation is a community that has a common historical legacy and way of living. Its resulting collective points of reference are: language, religion, judicial institutions, various organisations, and sometimes a common legal status. The criteria may vary from one nation to another and it is therefore impossible to form a theory that would be applicable to every case.21 A nation is first and foremost a community that has the same historical legacy […] a community that has built its own identity on the past and where collective memory plays the most important role.22

Most scholars who have written on nationhood agree that collective memory is an important part of nation building, but who’s memory is the question. Gérard Bouchard suggests that there must be a new debate on the subject of Quebec’s collective memory so as to integrate that of the aboriginals and recent immigrants.23 These ideas have been discussed and criticized.24 This debate raised new issues that have yet to be thoroughly examined by historians. A second dimension of Dumont’s thought refers to the belief in a collective destiny, the support of a common project. For him, collective memory and the capacity to plan a common future are two facets of the nation. Most important, a nation is characterized by its capacity to integrate newcomers: “An original culture is not one that remains in its past, but one than has a good capacity of integrating new elements.”25 Renan defined an ‘historical community’ by referring to the two main aspects of a nation: “To have done great things together and to want to continue doing great things together.” In this perspective, how can one integrate the contribution of strangers and immigrants? In Raisons communes, Dumont turns to the notion of ‘cultural convergence,’ a conceptual approach that was quite popular in the political arena towards the end of the 1980s but that was quickly put aside because of its numerous presuppositions and postulates. Because an historical community also projects into the future it is able to integrate the input of newcomers and, by convergence, acquire common cultural references. For Dumont, abstract princi20

Fernand Dumont, Genèse de la société québécoise (Montréal: Boréal, 1992). Fernand Dumont, Raisons communes (Montréal: Boréal, 1995), 5. Dumont 1995, 56. 23 Gérard Bouchard, La nation québécoise au futur et au passé (Montréal: VLB, 1999). 24 See Cantin 1997. 25 Dumont 1995, 81. 21 22

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ples such as legislation, individual rights, and political institutions – which are important aspects of a society – are insufficient to build a national community. For Dumont, Gary Caldwell’s and Julien Harvey’s idea of a common civic culture which allows for a democratic rebuilding of nations is much too abstract a notion on which to build national sentiment. While Dumont saw that historical communities should integrate new elements, he did not realize that by doing so they would be profoundly changed as shown in Michael Lind’s The Next American Nation. Employment, community groups, mixed marriages, schooling, social, professional and geographic mobility, and especially the sharing of a common language are all factors that facilitate integration of newcomers and thus the creation of a different entity. But the obligation to share established common cultural references, which is implicit in a culture of convergence, is difficult to uphold nowadays because contemporary societies favour diversity. Immigrants in particular tend to hold on to elements of their past and do not readily accept cultural convergence. If Dumont’s cultural convergence theory has been very much criticized, so has the importance he accorded to historical memory in the building of the Quebec nation. It is as if once Dumont had identified the two main components of the nation – the memory of its past and its projection into the future in building a new national entity – he gave precedence to the memorial aspect and paid little attention to diversity – the main component of its future – which involves the taking into account a significant other. He never directly addressed the place of immigrants in a convergent society – and when he did, his comments were usually vague – and it is precisely this question that makes for today’s many debates on his theory of Quebec’s nationhood. Some intellectuals have come up with different ways of seeing the nation, many of which are, in the long run, compatible with Dumont’s theory. Some new theories complete it while others oppose it. If Dumont’s theory on cultural convergence and the importance of history in the shaping of a nation has been subject to debate, so has his very diagnosis of the Quebec society. Dumont argues that French Canada has never been able to become a nation state and, as part of Canada, had only been able to preserve its cultural specificity inside the Canadian State. He claims that there are three nations in Quebec: a French nation, an English nation, and an Amerindian nation. The terms he used are badly chosen and outdated, they are those of the past and not in tune with neither Canada’s nor Quebec’s contemporary multicultural societies. Coming from Dumont this seems strange as he was very much aware of the power of words, and had even developed a sociology of interpretation. His choice of words indicates that he did not fully grasp the ongoing rebuilding proc-

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ess of the Quebec nation and was therefore unable to use the adequate terms to define the new social reality. Dumont saw Quebec as a pluri-national state where immigrants should assimilate into one of the two important national communities. His very concept of national communities has been questioned by Gérard Bouchard who says that to see Quebec in terms of national communities is to see it in terms of ethnic entities which, politically speaking is a deadlock.26 Bouchard wonders how one can politically work out a plan that takes into account three composing nations. Is it not bringing home the problems of the Canadian Federation? Personally I find that the debate over the perception of Dumont’s nation as ethnic is rather simplistic and, in part, inaccurate. Dumont’s Quebec was an open historical nation because it was able to integrate all the elements of its society. That Dumont did not perceive the consequence or implications of cultural diversity is another matter. Jacques Beauchemin is another sociologist who picks up on Dumont’s theory and clarifies certain aspects that pertain to an historical community.27 He first separates the political project from the political subject. On the one hand he sees that political projects – such as replacing the French-Canadian nation by the Quebec nation in recognition of the presence of immigrants and by francophone communities outside Quebec – are always subject to conflict because the various groups that intervene in the matter have different values and interests to defend. Quebec’s project on political sovereignty is the project of a number of Frenchspeaking Quebeckers and some immigrants who can be mobilized if necessary.28 We all know that some groups can draw up a common democratic project for the whole society while others aim to favour only part of it. For example, in the United States of the 1960s, there was Martin Luther King, the spokesman for a political group – the Black community – who pushed forward an important political project of equal rights for all Americans, both Black and White, while certain more radical Black leaders, such as Malcolm X, favoured the creation of Black States or measures in favour of Blacks only. Beauchemin adds that it is also the responsibility of the political subject to set the boundaries of the political project. The political subject can give birth to a political nation with strong cultural and historical foundations while keeping in 26

Bouchard 1999. Jacques Beauchemin, “La communauté de culture comme fondement du sujet politique chez Fernand Dumont,” Bulletin d’histoire politique Special edition: Présence et pertinence de Fernand Dumont 9.1 (2000): 29-39; Jacques Beauchemin 2001; Jacques Beauchemin, La société des identités, Ethique et politique dans le monde contemporain (Montréal: Athena, 2007). 28 See Gilles Gangné and Simon Langlois, Les raisons fortes. Nature et signification de la souveraineté du Québec (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2002). 27

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mind that, periodically, it must be refounded so as to take into account new elements and allow for recognition of diversity. Quebec’s new project, laid out by the historical French-speaking community, is now one that takes into account a renewed political nation and where public affairs are openly discussed. Quebec as a political nation In the 1990s, Quebec was referred to as a political nation. The term used was nation québécoise and the model was often seen as opposing that of a cultural nation. The notion of nation québécoise proved to be an important break in the history of French Canada and epitomized the refounded nation, the building of a new reference, the Quebec society. In recent studies, scholars generally give three meanings to the concept of ‘political nation.’ All three favour common citizenship but differ as to the degree of importance accorded to the cultural aspect and the role of collective memory. At one end of the spectrum, a political nation has no cultural content, in such cases it is called a civic nation. At the other end, it coincides with a cultural nation. In between these two points, political nations try to harmonize common citizenship with various cultural and national belongings. Let us now look more closely how the concept of a political nation has been characterized in the past few years in Quebec. In the 1990s, the concept of civic nation, that is one that is firstly defined by a common citizenship without any reference to individual characteristics such as pertains to ethnicity or culture, was popular. This type of nation is in conformity with Quebec’s 1975 and Canada’s 1980 Charters of Human Rights and Freedoms.29 In 1998, Claude Bariteau thoroughly explained Quebec’s emerging civic nation. Drawing from Jürgen Habermas’ theory of a common culture which respects the rights of individuals – constitutional patriotism – Bariteau argued that political culture does not have to be in sync with neither the anthropological nor the cultural characteristics of the majority.30 He was very critical of Fernand Dumont’s culture of convergence because it favoured the dominant culture but, as is the case in Canada, allowed for the acceptance of collective rights for the English-speaking minorities and aboriginal nations. To cultural convergence Bariteau prefers a political Quebec nation based on the respect of individual 29 30

Guy Laforest, Trudeau et la fin d’un rêve canadien (Sillery: Septentrion, 1992). For more on Habermas see Frédéric Guillaume, Patriotisme constitutionnel. Sur Jürgen Habermas (Montréal: Liber, 2001).

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democratic rights, with French as the common language and a public sphere which favours procedures over substance. If such was the case, the Quebec nation would avoid associating citizenship and nationality which he sees as two very different notions. The author also favours generosity towards the Englishspeaking minority and aboriginal peoples rather than including special rights in a written Constitution. To him, a nation that rests on a common political culture would guarantee linguistic, ethnic or cultural minorities individual rights to a peaceful coexistence with the majority. Bariteau’s definition has also been criticized. Daniel Salée for example argues that civic nationalism maintains socio-economic inequality because it has its roots in neo-liberalism31 and that, if the concept of civic nation has no ethnic factor, it becomes an abstract social entity, a pure product of a philosophical imagination.32 If the concept of civic nation as seen in Habermas’ constitutional patriotism perspective is seen as having zero coefficient ethnicity – to use Gérard Bouchard’s expression – does it not constitute a very abstract social entity? Can one overlook national sentiment, which must not be taken for nationalism? A political community is not the sum of the individuals it groups together (Jean Leca), nor can it be seen as a series of postal codes (Chantal Hébert). Bariteau agrees that cultural identity influences political activity but, in a multicultural society, he claims that a political nation can offer common ground. Like Dominique Schnapper, he thinks that citizenship transcends ethnic and community solidarities,33 but he does not go as far as to say that a political nation can build a new shared collective identity, in the form of a collective ‘we’ that Jean-Jacques Simard has defined in his numerous studies.34 Bariteau sees Quebec as a political nation that does not yet have the aspects of a cultural nation which is the characteristic of several modern nation-states. Past public debates often opposed ethnic nation and civil nation but today many say such a debate is artificial. This dichotomy is outdated according to Jacques Beauchemin because ethnic nations can also be democratic and civil and may also include identity issues.35 Guy Rocher speaks of the French-Canadian

31

Daniel Salée, “De l’avenir de l’identité québécoise,” in Maclure and Gagnon, 2001, 147-164. 150 and 160. 32 Ibid. 147. 33 Dominique Schnapper, La communauté des citoyens (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). 34 Jean-Jacques Simard, “Fragments d’un discours fatigué sur les identités québécoises,” Recherches sociographiques 21.1/2 (1980): 163-179; Jean-Jacques Simard, “Ou sont passés les Roughmen? Le destin du Québec anglais,” Recherches sociographiques 24.3 (1983): 391-412; Jean-Jacques Simard, “Ce siècle où le Québec est venu au monde,” in Québec 2000, ed. Roch Côté (Montréal: Fides, 1999), 18-77. 35 Beauchemin 2000.

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nationalism of the first half of the 20th Century36 – often seen as cultural and having to fight to survive – as having, on the contrary, a strong civic component promoting a secession with England, a Canadian identity, the creation of national symbols which would be wholly Canadian, and especially official recognition of the pact signed between two founding peoples. The French-Canadian political subject had a political project for Canada as a whole (and not only for French Canadians) that has never been recognized. Charles Taylor also claims that because of the hybrid character of democratic societies it is impossible to define nations as purely civic or purely ethnic. Strongly anchored in republican liberalism, one or more ethnic groups form the heart of these societies.37 Gérard Bouchard’s position in regard to this debate is twofold: 1) there is an ethnic content in all national identities and this is not incompatible with the judicial presuppositions of a civil nation, and 2) even in nations which are recognised as representative of the civic model (such as France, the United States, and Canada for example), the state remains active in promoting a collective identity, establishing traditions, protecting the language and collective heritage, shaping collective memory, and promoting its national culture.38 In other words, the State plays an important role in nation building, as illustrated in contemporary Canada or in the United States.39 In his works, Charles Taylor distinguishes a cultural nation from a political nation. For him a political nation is more than just a question of citizenship, it is a place where social differences are recognized. This question of recognition is a central one in his works and it has been discussed the world over. In 1992, and again in 1994, Taylor developed a theory that linked the protection of the individual and collective rights of small communities. He was also an advocate of Quebec’s specificity which he claimed was founded on: 1) a political ethic based on human rights, equality, and democracy (which is its republican dimension); 2) French as the public language; 3) a certain connection to its historical past.40 Taylor adds that, from time to time, a nation must recognize the existence of new pillars, which is similar to Dumont’s theory on the refounding of nations. “[T]hey must be carved again, reshaped by the successive generations, beginning by the present one.”41

36

Guy Rocher, “Des intellectuels à la recherche d’une nation québécoise,” in Penser la nation québécoise, ed. Michel Venne. Coll.: Débat (Montréal: Québec-Amérique, 2000), 283-296. 37 Charles Taylor, “Nation culturelle, nation politique,” in Penser la nation québécoise, ed. Michel Venne. Coll. Débats (Montréal: Québec-Amérique, 2000), 37-48. 38. 38 Bouchard 1999. 39 Laforest 1995. 40 Taylor 2000, 41. 41 Ibid. 45.

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Taylor is against independence for Quebec and claims that the minorities do not accept the project of building an independent political entity even if they are invited to do so by the French-speaking majority. Taylor concludes that an allinclusive political Quebec nation is not yet a reality.42 Personally, I find that his appraisal is premature and unjustified for two reasons. Firstly, it is clear that Quebec’s linguistic policy has just begun to show its effects on the social integration and the social cohesion of the Quebec society, a fact recognized by Charles Taylor. Secondly, the political project put forth by the new nationalism in Quebec insists on the inclusion of all Quebeckers in refounding the nation. Michel Seymour prefers a much broader political definition of the Quebec nation with references to culture and memory. He claims that the traditional French-Canadian cultural nation has been replaced by a political nation. This political nationalism refers to the nation as a socio-political community. Like Dumont before him, he feels that “the nation does not only depend on the way we see ourselves, but also on what we want to become.”43 Because Seymour does not see the nation only as a civic entity, he cannot share Bariteau’s view. For Seymour, nation and citizenship are not interchangeable “because people who belong to different nations can share a same civic identity.”44 This sociopolitical way of seeing the nation implicitly recognises that different entities such as the English-speaking minority in Quebec – whose historical contribution to Quebec society has been important – and immigrants, each with their linguistic and cultural heritage, can be part of a national whole. “The nation in Quebec can therefore be considered as a political community composed of a majority of French-speaking Quebeckers, a minority of English-speaking Quebeckers, and of individuals whose origins are Italian, Jewish, Greek, Portuguese, Haitian, Lebanese, Latin-American, etc. who generally speak a language other than French or English.” Seymour refutes all exclusive civic nationalism that does not take differences into account because recognition of various identities is fundamental in any society. Also, for any nation to exist in the sense that Seymour sees it, it must represent itself as a nation. For example, Ontario exists as a political community but, unlike Quebec, it is not a nation because it does not perceive and does not promote itself as such.45 The concept of nation québécoise is now an integral part of the public and political discourses. Ideas are now more precise and the debate has progressed. 42

Ibid. 48. Michael Seymour, Le pari de la démesure. L’intransigeance canadienne face au Québec (Montréal: L’Hexagone, 2001), 27. 44 Ibid. 32. 45 See Michel Seymour, De la tolérance à la reconnaissance. Une théorie libérale des droits collectifs (Montréal: Boréal, 2007). 43

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Today, the nation seen as an historical community does not exclude neither citizenship nor diversity and it respects individual rights. The debate has helped to understand the complexity of a political nation and its necessary relation to memory and culture.46 The two dimensions of the refounding process: language and territory For the past few years the debate on Quebec’s nationhood has zeroed in on two principal dimensions: French language and territory. On the one hand, French has become the very symbol of the Quebec nation, it is at the heart of its new collective self-image and its present realities. On the other hand, if traditional French Canada covered a vast territory, today the Quebec nation is confined to its territorial limits which complicate the relations not only with its Englishspeaking minority but also with the First Nations who live inside its borders. Outside Quebec the French Canadian minorities have also chosen to redefine themselves as communities inside Canada, with the exception of Acadie where a unique national sentiment exists. The French speaking communities of Canada are marked by a double refusal. Firstly, they refuse to define themselves by reference to Quebec, that is as hors-Québec, and secondly, a more recent phenomenon, they refuse to define themselves as minorities. A North-American francophonie Gérard Bouchard has been quite critical of Fernand Dumont, if he agrees with his thoughts about the nation as a construct reference, he does not agree with his way of defining the empirical nation in Quebec. He agrees that the imaginary, symbolic, and memorial aspects are important elements of a national identity but adds that new symbols must be included in the process of nation building. In his book, La nation québécoise au futur et au passé, Bouchard favours the introduction of new historical facts and, inevitably, a reinterpretation of the past. He suggests that one could take into account aboriginal history in the process of rebuilding the nation for example. Recognition and promotion of the French language as the common language of Quebec’s civil society are at the heart of the new nation building that would replace the old French-Canadian. To eliminate all reference to ethnic elements – like common ancestors or old stock origin – the Quebec nation must be con46

Jocelyn Maclure and Alain-G. Gagnon, eds., Repères en mutation. Identité et citoyenneté dans le Québec contemporain. Coll.: Débats (Montréal:Québec-Amérique, 2001).

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sidered as a North-American francophonie where French would be the common language spoken by all, newcomers and English-speaking Quebeckers included. The nation québécoise model would then no longer be perceived as being intolerant or xenophobic.47 The younger generation, new migrants who have never been preoccupied with the survival of the French culture, as well as the AngloQuebeckers who are attached to the French language should then feel that they could be part of this new nation and share its new self representation. Bouchard suggests a quadruple transfer: 1) ethnicity to rule of law, 2) an organic francophonie to a linguistic francophonie, 3) a French-Canadian culture to a Quebec culture, and 4) cultural nationalism to a new developmental collective project.48 Bouchard has carefully chosen the expression ‘collective development’ in lieu of ‘civic nationalism’ so as to insure that the nation is seen as ethnic as well as civic. Bouchard further develops the concept of Quebec’s nationhood in terms of co-integration – refusing all forms of assimilation or exclusion – which favours diversity and therefore continuous negotiation of all of Quebec’s ethnic or cultural groups. He pleads for acceptance of conflict zones and tensions that are normal in democratic societies. In short it means learning to live together on a daily basis.49 How do Bouchard’s propositions correspond to Quebec’s contemporary social reality? Is it wishful thinking? Is the notion of francophonie too vague, too abstract, to serve as the main national reference as defined above and as the basis on which to build a new common imagery? More research is needed to answer these questions but one can state that, since the 1960s and the Quiet Revolution, French is gradually becoming the common language in Quebec. One must however also add that, according to recent statistics on languages spoken in workplaces and households, English has also made great progress, especially in Montréal. Quebec nation seen as a region state In the 1990s, the notion of Quebec as a territorial nation also became popular: “A Quebecker is one who lives inside of Quebec’s boundaries.” This extremely abstract and objective way of defining a nation was first put forth in reaction to the many ethnic nationalisms which caused major problems in the world during the second half of the 20th Century. During and after the Referendum campaign 47 48 49

Bouchard 1999, 71. Ibid. 73. Gérard Bouchard, “Nation et co-intégration: contre la pensée dichotomique,” in Maclure and Gagnon 2001, 21-36. 35.

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on Quebec’s sovereignty in the mid-1990s, many opponents attempted to discredit Quebec’s political project by associating it with a narrow ethnic nationalism. Some politicians and intellectuals preferred the much more neutral term of territorial nationalism which totally avoided the ethnic issue. To define a nation exclusively in territorial terms is not realistic because nations are much more complex entities.50 They have historical, cultural, political, and spatial aspects that vary over time. Even if territory is important, it cannot alone serve to build a national identity but, because it is associated with a shared imagery, it cannot be totally ignored be it in Quebec or elsewhere. Present day Europe is an eloquent example of a new contemporary collective identity building on a mythical territory shared by many countries.51 Alain-G. Gagnon gives more importance to the territorial aspect of nationhood because he sees culture and politics as territorially based.52 He defines Quebec as a political and cultural nation defined territorially. Gagnon speaks of region state the way others speak of nation states and claims that region states are social and political entities which are becoming the norm because they have numerous possibilities for national assertion. In the case of Quebec he prefers this concept to that of nation state for three main reasons: 1) a region state is in a better position to maintain social cohesion as it favours a close-knit community and therefore a better grip on its present and future, 2) it is directly accountable to its citizens, and 3) having a smaller territorial base, it is easier for the community to define itself. “The right for a political community to define itself is a sign of self-assertion and identity building which is the most effective act of empowerment.”53 A region state favours the construction of new identities, the elaboration of collective projects, and a sense of togetherness. He feels that “Quebec has all the necessary ingredients to define itself as a cultural and political nation.” In specific contexts, a territorial nation can also correspond to a nation state.54 The concept of a ‘national region state’ has the advantage of seeing the emerging Quebec nation without the drawbacks that come with the project of renewing the Canadian Federation or of building a sovereign state. With this approach, the building of a new nation becomes possible no matter what the constitutional status of Quebec is. In other words, it is not closely linked to the political program of the Parti Québécois and allows Quebec’s current Liberal 50

Alain-G. Gagnon and Raffaele Iacovino, De La nation à la multination. Les rapports QuébecCanada (Montréal: Les Éditions du Boréal, 2007). 51 Henri Mendras, L'Europe des Européens: sociologie de l'Europe occidentale (Paris: Gallimard, 1997); Henri Mendras, La France que je vois. Coll. Frontières (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2002). 52 Alain-G. Gagnon, “Le Québec, une nation inscrite au sein d’une démocratie étriquée,” in Maclure and Gagnon 2001, 21-65. 53. 53 Ibid. 62-63. 54 Ibid. 52-53.

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prime minister, Jean Charest, to use the expression nation québécoise without any political remorse. Anglo-Quebeckers and the Quebec nation How must one react to Dumont’s 1995 assertion that Quebec cannot include people by the magic power of words who do not accept to be part of it? It can be said that Bill 101 has given cultural minorities access to the renewed nation and one might think that Dumont’s pessimism was greatly exaggerated. Only the future will tell if French as a common language can effectively play the role English does in Canada outside Quebec or in the United States. If Quebec has always taken into account its English-speaking minority when undertaking major reforms, such has not been the case for the Frenchspeaking minorities in other Canadian provinces. When regional colleges (CEGEP) were implemented in 1967-1968, four of them were created to serve the English-speaking population. Later, when local health centres (CLSC) were created, Quebec automatically set up some with services in English. The same was done for the creation of school boards some years before55 and, must we add, there are also English-speaking universities in Quebec. Since the Quiet Revolution there has been a change in the self-image of English-speaking Quebeckers. They have always been part of the Canadian majority group, but since 1960 they have become a minority in Quebec.56 JeanJacques Simard claims that they seem to have changed places with their ‘privileged other:’ “They used to belong to a civil, political, and cultural nation while we held on to our ethno-linguistic filiations. Today it is the opposite: when they used to build, we used to survive and since we have started building they are worried about their survival.”57 A fine example of inversion in self-definition. It is sometimes said that French-Canadians have become orphans of their nation because their nation no longer exists as such,58 the same cannot really be 55

See Hubert Guindon, Tradition, modernité et aspiration nationale de la société québécoise, eds. Roberta Hamilton and John L. McMullan (Montréal: Albert Saint-Martin 1990); Hubert Guindon “Chronique de l’évolution sociale et politique du Québec depuis 1945,” Cahiers de recherche sociologique 30 (1998): 33-78. 56 Gary Caldwell and Eric Wadell, Les anglophones du Québec: de majoritaires à minoritaires (Québec: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 1982). 57 Jean-Jaques Simard, “Ce siècle où le Québec est venu au monde,” in Québec 2000, ed. Roch Côté (Montréal: Fides, 1999), 18-77. 58 Marcel Martel, Le deuil d'un pays imaginé: rêves, luttes et déroute du Canada français: les rapports entre le Québec et la francophonie canadienne, 1867-1975 (Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1996).

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said about Anglo-Quebeckers because their nation still exists and this is a fundamental difference between the English-speaking minority in Quebec and the French-speaking minorities in Canada. Anglo-Quebeckers can count on a NorthAmerican environment dominated by the English language. More so, they belong to a nation that, since the adoption of its 1982 Constitution Act, has become more self-assertive. Becoming a minority in Quebec has not deprived them of the Canadian nation as their privileged reference. On the contrary. One should not believe that the concept and the reality of the nation québécoise as the new reference have completely or partially rallied AngloQuebeckers. For some time, let us say from the mid-1960s, the term québécois was synonymous with French Canadians of Quebec. Multiculturalism and cultural diversity were not yet on Quebec’s or Canada’s agenda and therefore self definition did not necessarily include the immigrants.59 It is only in the 1980s that national references began to change, some went as far as defining Englishspeaking Quebeckers as a national minority, inferring that they were part of a larger Quebec nation just as French-speaking minorities were part of the larger Canadian nation. This perception is not necessarily shared by most of Englishspeaking Quebeckers because they did not abandon their Canadian reference even if they now perceive themselves as a minority in the new Quebec society that was put in place more than 40 years ago. It is still too soon to say if the English-speaking minority see themselves as Anglo-Quebeckers just as the French-speaking population of Ontario see themselves as Franco-Ontariens, but as the demographics of the English-speaking population change so do the relationship with the French-speaking majority. This last point is important because a part of the English-speaking community of Montréal stems from Canadian multiculturalism. The present political project, which dates back to René Lévesque, has taken into account the presence and historical rights of the English-speaking community. René Lévesque had strong feelings about this and held on to his ideas no matter how difficult it was at times. The recognition of the English-speaking minority has been included in all legislation concerning health care and social services and the recent amendments to Bill 101, while maintaining French as the official language, recognize the importance of English as a second language, a compromise accepted by most of the English-speaking population of Montréal, but seen as threatening by some francophones. In the past, the minority had little contact with the French-speaking majority, but since the 1960s things have changed. The English-speaking population of Quebec have created a political party (Equality Party) and set up advocacy 59

See Marcel Rioux, Les Québécois (Paris: Seuil, 1974).

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groups (Alliance-Quebec for example) so as to have an official voice in all social matters. There are a few radicals on both sides but, on the whole, the debates have remained civilized. The important fact here is that today the Englishspeaking population participate in Quebec’s national debate that has been going on for several decades, some groups have even added the word ‘Quebec’ in their titles but, contrary to French-Canadian minorities throughout the rest of Canada who define themselves as bilingual Canadians, they have not yet gone as far as officially integrating the Quebec nation as their reference. The Amerindians and the Quebec nation Before closing, a few words on the aboriginal question. Quebec’s Amerindians do not wish to be closely integrated into neither the Canadian nor the Quebec nation, at least in a sociological sense. They define themselves as belonging to their own nations, to ancestral nations who have lived in the Americas for thousands of years.60 They refer to themselves as First Nations. Constitutionally and sociologically they have been recognized as forming different nations but, because they live in small national communities, they must join larger political entities in which they claim full participation as equal entities. They therefore define themselves also according to the State in which they live. Canadian Aboriginal peoples are thus different from American Aboriginal peoples because they are linked to different political communities. Does the fact that some First Nations live in Quebec change things? As aboriginals slowly take control of their own economy, the contact with the Frenchspeaking majority has become much more positive than in the 1980s. On October 23rd 2001, Quebec’s premier, Bernard Landry and the Cree’s Grand Chief, Ted Moses, signed an important Agreement in Principle (La paix des braves) and negotiations are ongoing with Saint Lawrence’s North Shore Innus. The fact that the political and administrative elite of the various aboriginal nations negotiate directly with the Quebec Government is a sign of a gradual integration into Quebec’s society.61 For the past 50 years, both Quebec and Canada (which includes its Frenchspeaking minorities with their new communitarian orientation) have each been rebuilding their respective nations. Quebec’s self-definition is that of an historical and political community, an imagined nation that for some is part of the Ca60

Denys Delâge,“Le Québec et les autochtones,” in Penser la nation québécoise, ed. Michel Venne. Coll.: Débats (Montréal: Québec-Amérique, 2000), 215-228. 61 Jean-Jacques Simard, La réduction. L’autochtone inventé et les Amérindiens d’aujourd’hui (Sillery: Septentrion, 2003).

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nadian Federation and for others, a sovereign nation – or on the way to becoming one – or a region-state. The notion of the nation québécoise is now largely shared and accepted by most of the population even if there are still many problems to be solved. The federal House of Commons has also officially recognized the existence of the nation québécoise in 2006, but this recognition has up to now no constitutional basis. French as the common language is the cultural foundation of the Quebec nation which is governed by rule of law. Its population composed of a French-speaking majority, an English-speaking minority, and newcomers are all part of its past and more recent history. If the presence of immigrants contributes to modify the way Quebeckers see themselves – as seen in recent Quebec literature for example –it has also modified the way Englishspeaking Canadians see themselves.

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Negotiating Diversity and Diaspora: Planting Chava Rosenfarb’s Tree of Life in a Canadian Context Julie Spergel

Interviewed in 2005, poet, playwright and novelist Chava Rosenfarb refused to allow her book The Tree of Life: A Novel about Life in the Lodz Ghetto1 to be categorised as Canadian literature: There is not a speck of Canada in that book. Not only it’s not about Canada but it is written from a different perspective ҟ not a Canadian perspective ҟ from a specifically Jewish ghetto perspective. It is the Holocaust. This is a corner where Jews lived with their entire beings, their minds, their bodies in the Holocaust, which didn’t belong to Canada, had nothing to do with Canada. I didn’t even know that a Canada existed at that time. You can’t make it Canadian in any way except for the fact that I wrote it here.2

Although winning a 2005 Canadian Jewish Book Award and being nominated for an Alberta Book Award for Survivors: Seven Short Stories3 seems to suggest that the public is eager to include her in its national canon, Rosenfarb does not believe that her having written novels in Canada and having made her home there for over fifty years grants her admission into the dominion of Canadian literature. Goldie Morgentaler, her translator, critic and daughter, concurs and further asserts that Rosenfarb’s novels are “European works by an essentially European writer, who just happens to be living in North America.”4 Her books are written in a European language and chiefly involve European times and 1

Chava Rosenfarb, The Tree of Life: A Novel About Life in the Lodz Ghetto, trans. Chava Rosenfarb and Goldie Morgentaler (Melbourne: Scribe, 1985). All subsequent citations are taken from this edition. 2 Chava Rosenfarb, telephone interview, 21 Aug 2005. 3 Chava Rosenfarb, Survivors: Seven Short Stories, trans. Goldie Morgentaler (Toronto: Cormorant Books, 2004). Although this collection of stories is her first that unfolds in a Canadian setting, thereby gaining the writer more mainstream Canadian recognition, public perception seems to take for granted that once she is understood to be a Canadian writer, this includes all her work.. 4 Goldie Morgentaler, “Land of the Postscript: Canada and the Post-Holocaust Fiction of Chava Rosenfarb,” Judaism 49.2 (2000), .

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places. They were not even originally published in Canada, but in Israel and Australia. In The Tree of Life, the reader is transported not to a Canada through Polish-Canadian eyes but rather to an over-crowded industrial city and a ghetto of war-torn Poland from a decidedly European perspective. How could it be Canadian? Tree of Life, Chava Rosenfarb’s enormous 1972 Yiddish-language novel, monitors several interconnected individuals’ experiences in Lodz from 19381944. A survivor of the Lodz ghetto and later Auschwitz, Sasel and BergenBelsen, Chava Rosenfarb, who doubles here as eyewitness and fiction-writer, does not only present characters who deliberate the meaning of being Jewish in a time of nationalism, but also their attempts to endure a merciless suffering that sometimes forces Jews to turn on one another. Describing how the Jews were thrown together in the ghetto by a faceless oppressor to “cook in their own sauce,”5 Rosenfarb is concerned with how time measuredly weathers people until their politics, personalities or lives are completely different. As the novel opens, a heated debate arises whereby the question of whether or not Jews constitute a nation is tossed around. For those who answer in the affirmative, further problems ensue: Could they be good Polish patriots, if they considered themselves good Jews? […] And how was a Jew supposed to behave if he became a soldier and had to fight against another Jew, a citizen of an enemy country? If the Jews were indeed a nation, then the result would be, that two people belonging to the same nation might have to kill each other, while defending the interests of two alien nations. Then how could one reconcile the fact that Jews might be very good citizens and patriots of the countries they lived in, and yet feel closer to the Jews of other countries than to the people with whom they shared the same soil?6

The quandary of how to reconcile Polish and Jewish identities is immediately foregrounded. With the onset of the war, however, Rosenfarb’s characters are not permitted to decide for themselves where their Judaism begins and their Polish nationalism ends, especially when their Polish neighbours launch their witchhunts and, out of fear, single out the “dirty thieves” who tarnish their national pride. This choice is taken away from them. The novel’s concern with how Jews in Poland were prohibited from combining their ethno-religious and national identities is paralleled in the question raised by Tree of Life’s recent re-publishing in English: is this a Canadian book? Despite Rosenfarb’s valid arguments and reluctance, Tree of Life is an example 5 6

Rosenfarb 1985, 487. Ibid. 8.

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of Canadian writing. This is not because the promise of security was granted to Rosenfarb and afforded her an atmosphere that encouraged the telling of her preCanada experiences. Such reasoning would be too reminiscent of Emma Lazarus’s articulation of America’s promise at Ellis Island: “Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Canada was not this shelter, not this beacon of hope, when Jews needed it most.7 Moreover, it would be mocking Rosenfarb’s past to say that Canada provided her the safe haven from which she could write about the traumatic experiences in the corrupt lands of Europe; the ‘us’ and ‘them’ scenario that would ensue is superfluous. Furthermore, Rosenfarb’s encouragement to write came from her Jewish roots and not from relocation to Canada. Her source of inspiration is unsurprising given the fecund environment Lodz provided for Yiddish writers and poets. As will be argued in the following, Tree of Life is a Canadian novel because, mirroring what should be the goal of Canadian literature, Rosenfarb examines overlapping layers of the past through the eyes of the large cast of her monumental novel in order to give a podium to stifled and contained voices of the past. Since Rosenfarb’s work speaks for those who almost slipped through the cracks of history, it is an endorsement of multiculturalism. In Tree of Life, Rosenfarb unveils intermingled and stratified pasts by fictionalising the Lodz ghetto as, to play with a term from Mikhail Bakhtin, a ‘Jewish chronotope.’ Jewish chronotopes, as a form of spatial history, are those socio-historical spacetimes where there was once a Jewish presence that in literature become the site for the telling of Jewish experience. Each Jewish chronotope  whether it is the shtetl, the Shoah,8 a burgeoning Canadian city, or, as in this case, the Lodz ghetto  explores Jewish life as valuable and intrinsic to that time and space. Only ostensibly a paradox, Jewish identity needs a chronotope in order to be articulated because it is elusive due to having existed variously in numerous time-spaces with a continually expanding set of narratives. Exposing the malleability of identity and the multiplicity of Jewishness through its assortment of Polish Jews, the novel corresponds to Canada’s history that is also comprised of layered, interrelational pasts. Tree of Life is therefore  even if unwittingly  a supporter in the 7

According to Irving Abella and Harold Troper’s study None is Too Many, only 5,000 European Jews were allowed into Canada during the twelve-year Nazi reign. To learn more about Canada’s closed immigration policies, see: Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933-1945 (Toronto: Lester Publishing, 1991). 8 ‘Shoah’ is the Hebrew word for ‘catastrophe’ and has been purposely chosen to replace the word ‘Holocaust,’ which means ‘burnt offering.’ What happened to the Jewish people during the Nazi regime was not the result of willing sacrifice, but was an event of unprecedented catastrophic proportions. Using the term Shoah is in alignment with the belief that the Shoah was not an inevitable and deserved punishment for living in the Diaspora, but rather a cataclysmic consequence of endemic anti-Semitism.

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plea for a functioning multiculturalism in a country where the official mandate often fails in practice and is subject to ever-increasing criticism. It is important to understand Rosenfarb’s debut novel as a Canadian book through its support of multiculturalism because it also helps define a JewishCanadian identity for the present. Because being Canadian since 19829 is designed to denote not having to choose between identities, the Jewish-Canadian interest in investigating through, for example, fiction such as Rosenfarb’s the many times and spaces where Jews have lived and loved is a metaphor for Canadian multiculturalism’s encouragement of negotiating a Canadian identity with European and other non-Canadian roots. The Jewish Diaspora tells a story similar to that of multicultural Canada, one where individuals are permitted to feel an attachment to more than one place. In fact, the two are so intricately linked that if a case can be made for Jewish Diaspora’s legitimacy and thus for Jewish multiplicity, then Canadian diversity can also be made a viable means for defining what it is to be Canadian. If chronotopes help disprove a teleological view of Jewish history that culminates in  and thus inadvertently provides a meaning for  the Shoah, it follows that Jewish history is comprised of equally valuable stories that overlap and inform one another, attesting to a variety of ways to be Jewish. Paralleling this line of thought, stories from all over the world that represent or are important to Canada’s citizens will also reveal Canada’s spatial history and, accordingly, not only fulfil the goals of multiculturalism, but also amend some of its failings. Consequently, a work such as Tree of Life can be placed in both a transnational Jewish context and a Canadian one; they are no longer mutually exclusive because a severance between different parts of an identity is not necessary. Canadian literature is thus encouraged to shift in order to encompass transnational writing. A novel such as Rosenfarb’s Tree of Life lends itself to a meaning of Jewish identity that denies the notion of Zion at the centre, and therefore also of all Diaspora communities as existing only at the periphery. In discussing the novel, questions regarding the dialectics of pairs such as Canadian/non-Canadian, Zion/Diaspora, and official/unofficial histories transcend the political into the realm of the moral. In keeping with Walter Benjamin’s idea that redemption comes from “striv[ing] anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it,” writers such as Rosenfarb know that “even the dead

9

In Pierre Trudeau’s famous speech to the House of Commons in 1971, he proposed the concept of multiculturalism, to be lodged within a bilingual framework, in order to include the ever-increasing minority populations in the idea of what it means to be Canadian. In 1982, multiculturalism was officially adopted into Canada’s constitution in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Bill C-93, the official Multiculturalism Act, followed in 1988.

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will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.”10 It is thus a matter of principle to protect the past from monologism. Jewish-Canadian identity, proudly located in the Diaspora, is conceived through the dialogue between past and present and is envisioned as a story that continues to be written. The Lodz ghetto is a part of this evolving chronicle. Jewish history is long and wide; to disregard Diaspora stories from the variety of Jewish chronotopes is to fritter away its vast “usable past,” to use Henry Steele Commager’s term. Canada, too, could draw from not only the mainstream “storehouse of […] memory,”11 but from the collective memories of all of its citizens. Since narratives shape one’s identity, Canada will have to  in order to be the multicultural nation it claims to be in its constitution  continue to adopt the numerous transnational stories of its newest citizens. Jewish Diaspora Redefines the ‘Hyphen-nation’ Essential to any literary chronotope is memory. Acting as a realm of intercession, memory is a spatial form that links space and time, and this overlap offers the alternative to a linear historiography, indicating that multiple pasts are shown to intersect and inform one another.12 Memory also becomes a moral issue, and helps create communal identity since a group defines itself by the stories it chooses to tell. In his 2003 collection of articles, Jewish Frontiers: Essays on Bodies, Histories, and Identities, Sander L. Gilman argues that the way Jewish history is read needs to be reformulated. Instead of considering Jewish people as exiles, forever living in the Diaspora, their collective history should be re-interpreted as Jews living at the frontier, a place where cultures interact to define themselves and those around them. Gilman proposes that since the traditional centre-periphery model of Israel and the Diaspora poses complications in the twenty-first century, due to its inherent political problems, a model that exists always in the present and relates only to itself would be more beneficial. This is necessary, Gilman argues, because it would render the various Diasporas consequential. It would also present a space not only of victimhood, but also of com10

Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 4 (Cambridge, MA and London, Eng: The Belknap P of Harvard University Press, 2003), 389-400. 391. 11 Henry Steele Commager, The Search for a Usable Past and Other Essays in Historiography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 16. 12 Meredith Anna Criglington, “Constructions of Home: The City as a Site of Spatial History and Post-Settler Identity in Four Commonwealth Novels” (Diss., University of Toronto, 2004) 19, 292.

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promise, middle ground, contest and accommodation, thus encouraging the articulation of multiple voices. The concept of Jewish chronotopes parallels Gilman’s rejection of a teleological concept of Jewish history in Jewish Frontiers. To write a novel set in a Jewish chronotope13 is to revise historiography and to have the Jewish role at the frontier recognised. Jewish identity is not bound to a singular space and time due to the fact that many places are part of Jewish cultural memory. James E. Young suggests that this “looks less like collective memory and more like collected memory” in that it does not ascribe a singular meaning “to disparate memories, [but] many meanings […] exist side by side. In fact, even the same Jewish memory […] may have multiple meanings, depending on who receives it, under what conditions and to what ends.”14 Gilman’s Jewish frontiers model is linked to the concept of Jewish chronotopes through its similar emphasis on discourse and dialogue. No identity is monolithic; all identities are multiple. For instance, if one were to discuss a Canadian Jew, which part of the identity is hegemonic? The two parts of the identity cannot be neatly separated; they are relational and overlap. It thus becomes a matter of polylogue. Similar to how linear history is rejected by the chronotope, so, too, is the subject understood as a process that discards the linear between the signifier and the signified, thereby multiplying the subject.15 Moreover, as will be argued in the course of this paper, inherited narratives can be said to create identity for a cultural group in the same way that polylogue defines the subject. In a multicultural Canada, where many histories collide in a physical space that is not always hospitable, this is also of particular interest. One of the main critiques of multiculturalism is that it has engendered the common loss of Canadian culture and has therefore promoted the formation of 13

It is important to point out that the chronotope differs significantly from a novel’s ‘setting.’ Although setting, like the chronotope, includes “general locale, historical time and social circumstances” (See: M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 8th ed. (Boston, MA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005), 294.), writing that employs the chronotope will also draw attention to the curving of time as perceived in a space. By favouring only its temporal relationships, setting is an approach to literature that does not necessarily expose the interrelation of space and time that allows for multiplicity. Setting is where events occur, but the chronotope gives meaning to those events. A chronotope’s validity rests upon its ability to reveal meaning and multiple pasts: “All the novel’s abstract elements  philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyses of cause and effect  gravitate toward the chronotope and through it take on flesh and blood, permitting the imaging power of art to do its work.” See: M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas P, 2004), 250. 14 James E. Young “Jewish Memory in a Postmodern Age,” in Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew,’ ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Maras (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 211-225. 214. 15 See: Julia Kristeva, Polylogue (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977) for the original French edition, or: Julia Kristeva, “The Subject in Process,” in The Tel Quel Reader, ed. Patrick French and RolandFrancois Lack (New York: Routledge, 1998), 133-178.

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ghettos and enclaves. Multiculturalism is said to have removed the possibility of a centre for those who wish to escape an ethnicity and assimilate into a national identity. Critics add that multiculturalism places groups at the margins and not at the middle of public culture and national identity.16 Placing ethnic groups at the periphery is further exacerbated by the debate over the ‘hyphen,’ whereby members of ethnic groups are marginalised by never being ‘just Canadian’ but rather ‘Chinese-Canadian,’ ‘Jewish-Canadian,’ or even ‘French-Canadian.’ In the 2002 study “Interrogating the Hyphen-Nation: Canadian Multicultural Policy and ‘Mixed Race’ Identities,” Minelle Mahtani suggests that such a policy also constructs specific socio-spatial boundaries between the identifications of ‘Canadian’ and ‘not Canadian’ because the hyphen actually creates spaces of distinction, further complicating the question of national identity by positioning ethnicity outside of Canadianness.17 Her study led Mahtani to the conclusion that most immigrants prefer to be called simply ‘Canadian,’ not only in order to avoid a “whole geography and history of explanation,”18 but also because they wish to embrace a definition of national identity that is not dictated by ethnicity but by multiple identifications.19 Such disapproval is important to a thorough understanding of multiculturalism. Nevertheless, as exemplified by the Jewish Diaspora, this critique disregards that it is precisely the lack of a centre that provides a fertile, life-affirming, on-going cultural story of multiple identifications for groups in Canada encouraged to foster an ethnic identity despite a potential desire to be ‘just Canadian.’ The many stories that make Jewish history so rich and colourful analogise how the narratives belonging to all of Canada’s groups can provide Canada with strength through diversity. If ‘just Canadian’ is newly understood in and of itself as a ‘hyphen,’ then no one will be outside; questions of Diaspora and belonging will become the norm. Moreover, if the ‘hyphen’ is also attributed to mainstream Anglo and French Canadians, then ‘ethnicity’ is not ‘othered.’ As the Ukrainian-Canadian writer and critic Janice Kulyk Keefer has asked: “How can we say that Josef Skvorecky and Rohinton Mistry are ‘multicultural’ while Alice Munro is just ‘Canadian?’ Isn’t a Scottish background as

16

To read up on the multiculturalism debate, see for example: Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1994); or, Linda Hutcheon and Marion Richmond, eds., Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990). 17 Minelle Mahtani, “Interrogating the Hyphen-Nation: Canadian Multicultural Policy and ‘MixedRace’ Identities,” CERIS Working Paper 20, ed. Michael J. Doucet (Toronto: Joint Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement, 2002), 1-35. 16. 18 Ibid. 19. 19 Ibid. 22.

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‘ethnic’ as a Czech or Parsi one?”20 A level playing field is created by deprivileging the centre in favour of the equality and co-existence of a number of groups. Canadian identity is thus unified in its multiplicity. To define Canadianness otherwise is to exclude all the different ways there are to be Canadian that are presently being practised in Canada. Nonetheless, it is difficult to deny the unfairness that some ethnic groups so integral to multiculturalism are forced to feel when they appear to be placed in a system of containment where they are ‘tolerated’ or ‘managed,’ but never really accepted. “Other cultures are all right as long as they can be placed within a commonly understood and accepted framework,” writes Frances Henry, “The political and public discourse affirms a faith in a pluralistic society but, at the same time, resists the demands that the articulation of cultural and racial differences makes upon a democratic liberal society, that is inclusion, equity, and empowerment.”21 Although not the cause of marginalisation, racism, poverty, and humiliation in the everyday reality of minorities, Henry suggests that multiculturalism has not solved any of these problems, either. The possible malfunctioning of multiculturalism is in the practice, however, and not in the theory. Henry offers a solution, one which allows for a continued working with the constitutionalised word ‘multiculturalism;’ she proposes that the “symbolic multiculturalism” that is a system of containment, one based on social order instead of social conflict and is thus a mere symbolic devotion to a pluralism that is regardless led by a white English-speaking dominant group that excludes minorities and ethnics from the public arena, be replaced with a “critical multiculturalism.” She explains that this new paradigm “rejects a unified and static concept of identities and communities as fixed sets of experiences, meanings, and practices. Instead, it focuses on identities as dynamic, fluid, multiple, and historically situated.”22 The focal point, then, is on the negotiation and compromise of interrelationships, which entails an understanding of the past as formed of a similarly dynamic and overlapping web of stories. Three different levels of multiculturalism are evident in its recent history. It began as a set of governmental policies. Later, encouraged by the sense of nationhood the concept gave to Canada, multiculturalism was adopted as the core of Canadian self-understanding. As of late, however, it can be viewed as a transnational project for which Canada has come to stand. A revision of multi-

20

Janice Kulyk Keefer, “From Mosaic to Kaleidoscope: Out of the Multicultural Past Comes a Vision of a Transcultural Future,” Books in Canada 20.6 (1991): 13-16. 14. 21 Frances Henry, “Canada’s Contribution to the ‘Management’ of Ethno-Cultural Diversity,” Canadian Journal of Communication 27 (2002): 231-242. 235. 22 Ibid. 239.

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culturalism instead of an eradication23 of the policy is the most effective approach to addressing its flaws. Similar to how multiculturalism is accused of forcing ethnic groups to remain within a static identity, the belief itself should not be perceived as remaining stationary. Multiculturalism is a symbolic space where different cultures live side by side, encouraged to express the narratives that are important to them.24 This, in turn, promotes negotiation as it recognises that a national identity is not fixed,25 and can flexibly invite others in. The disadvantage, however, is that it suggests that the pieces of the mosaic cannot blend and are only purposely placed there so they can be monitored. Multiculturalism must therefore be pushed to its limits; it needs to incorporate elements of transnationalism that render a subject from an either/or identity into a subject-inprogress that continually crosses borders, either physically in travel and migration, or figuratively in terms of storytelling and attachment to more than one home. Even though it may be imperfect, when Canada actively adopted multiculturalism into its constitution, it was an official attempt at acceptance, tolerance and inclusion. As will be argued in the following, Chava Rosenfarb’s novel the

23

Many critics have recommended a complete abandonment of the project of multiculturalism. Janice Kulyk Keefer, on the other hand, suggests instead renaming multiculturalism in order to abolish its “divide-and-conquer” (80) effects. According to Kulyk Keefer, multiculturalism is retrogressive  but not without promise  and her theory of the “transcultural” hopes to “salvage that part that can be salvaged  the play of cultural differences engendered by diverse experiences and constructions of race and ethnicity” (87). Whereas multiculturalism is about defending borders instead of crossing them, about essentialising and not exploring, transculturalism is about exchanging and sharing, while foregrounding the liminal positions between two or more different countries, cultures or communities. She argues that when Canadian writers of ethnic origins are called ‘ethnic’ writers or ‘immigrant’ writers this equates them with foreignness and does not accept them as Canadians, contrary to what the mythology of multiculturalism should entail. However, changing its name will not remedy multiculturalism’s inherent problems. As a constitutional policy, Canadians should work with and improve on the existing multiculturalism. Continual revision will ensure that it is adapting to evolving needs of ethnic communities and carrying out the goals proposed by Kulyk Keefer for transculturalism. See Janice Kulyk Keefer, “Memory, Story, Text: Transcultural Aesthetics and Norman Ravvin’s Café des Westens,” in Precarious Present/Promising Future?: Ethnicity and Identities in Canadian Literature, ed. Danielle Schaub, Janice Kulyk Keefer and Richard E. Sherwin (Jerusalem: The Magnes P, 1996), 77-96. 24 All stories belonging to Canadians, whether anecdotal, oral or literary, are Canadian stories. However, in order to partake in the open dialogue that will actively influence Canadian identity, they need to enter the public sphere. To be Canadian literature, then, the stories must be made public. Canadian literature is the most predominant marker of Canadian identity; nevertheless, it is but one collection of narratives that contributes to multiculturalism. The discourse of public institutions would be another example. 25 Jon Stratton and Ien Ang, “Multicultural Imagined Communities: Cultural Difference and National Identity in Australia and the USA,” Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture 8.2 (1994): 1-23. 8.

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Tree of Life is an example of how multiculturalism can work when all the stories belonging to all a nation’s cultures are adopted into its official history. The Lodz Ghetto as a Jewish Chronotope In Chava Rosenfarb’s Tree of Life, the Lodz ghetto is engaged as a Jewish chronotope, an historical time-and-space that brings to life the specificity of Jewish life as it was experienced in a particular time and place. Bakhtinian dialogue is derived from the idea that meaning is relational. A dialogised rhetoric is one where human activity is a unity of differences, made up of an array of voices (which include world-views as well as language), in what he has called heteroglossia. It is in a dialogised rhetoric that the heteroglossia  made up gradated and socially diverse speech types within a single national language  negotiate, express, and confront their differences. By setting works in Jewish chronotopes, stories that would not otherwise be heard are told, for it is in the novel where these chronotopes exist that “the eternally living element of unofficial language and unofficial thought (holiday forms, familiar speech, profanation)”26 occur. Literary chronotopes, as ideal sources of memory, propose a similar method of looking backwards through time. Rather than passively recording histories, they present “history as a permanent reactivation of the past in a critique of the present, and at the level of content offers a textual anamnesis for the hitherto ignored, unacknowledged or repressed pasts marginalised by the dominant histories  feminist narratives, ethnic narratives, non-heterosexual narratives.”27 The chronotope is thus a realm of memory rooted in a real socio-historic time-space that offers a podium for the hushed voices of the past and, in Walter Benjamin’s words, “blast[s] open the continuum of history.”28 In the chronotope, history, memory and fiction combine in the act of storytelling to provide a wellspring of unofficial stories. An identity for the raconteur then begins to form because it has become a moral duty to relay a version of the past. There is always a struggle between the official version of the past and the many unofficial versions that can convey equally well a truth of what happened. In the words of Canadian histori-

26

M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 20. 27 Peter Middleton and Tim Woods, Literatures of Memory: History, Time and Space in Postwar Writing (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 77. 28 Benjamin 396.

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cal fiction writer Marianne Brandis: “Fact is not the same as truth, though they may occasionally overlap.”29 The ghetto was created in the northeast part of the city, in the heart of the slums of Lodz, or Litzmanstadt as it was renamed upon German occupation in November 1939. The ghetto opened officially on February 8, 1940, when on this day and the few that followed it 164,000 Jews were forced to resettle and marched uphill towards their new ‘home,’ bringing with them, as per order, only what they could carry. The Germans called it the Übersiedlung, but a Jewish eyewitness dubbed it “a caravan of poverty.”30 In 1940, the most ‘comfortable’ year in the ghetto, there were 3.2 people per room.31 The area was small; one could ride on coach the breadth and width of the ghetto in under an hour. It was contained in a radius of 4.13 kilometres until 1941 when it was reduced to 3.82. Outside the barbed wire fence that imprisoned the Jews indefinitely as of May 1, 1940 after a few short months of being able to go in and out, hung the sign “Wohngebiet der Juden. Betreten Verboten,” indicating not a ghetto, but a ‘residential’ area. The Lodz ghetto was established mostly in the dilapidated Baluty, an area recognised as part of Lodz only since World War I, and partially in the Stare Miasto (Old Town), the site of the official Jewish ghetto of Lodz until 1861 and where the decrepit and overstuffed buildings verified this history. A little after its creation, the suburban area of Marysin was added, where the orphanage, schools and Hachsharot32 were placed before their original functions were unceremoniously abandoned. Marysin also included the cemeteries and the train station, the Umschlagplatz, where the transports left for deportation. Unable to redirect the traffic of the arterial streets Zgierska and Limanowskiego that ran through the ghetto, the Germans were able to keep these busy roads within their territory by connecting Marysin and Baluty with three footbridges, where loitering  to look down at the trams full of non-Jews going by, for example  was punishable by death. Of the 220,000 Jews to have passed through the Lodz ghetto, only 5,000-7,000 are thought to have survived. Although hunger, cold and disease ravaged 21% the population, the rest were deported to extermination camps or murdered within the ghetto borders. The ghetto was liquidated in 1944. The author is very clear about the book’s status as a work of fiction; the subtitle is, after all, ‘A Novel about Life in the Lodz Ghetto,’ and yet its role as an historical account cannot be ignored. Rosenfarb heartily accepted the responsibil29

Marianne Brandis, “Past Present: Imagining and Writing History,” The New Quarterly 84 (2002): 18-33. 20. 30 Irena Liebman, “Lodz Ghetto Diary,” in Lodz Ghetto: Inside a Community Under Siege, ed. Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides (New York: Viking, 1989), 35. 31 Adelson 88. 32 Hachsharot are little plots of land used by Zionist groups to teach agriculture in preparation for developing Eretz Israel.

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ity of bearing witness when she undertook the writing of Tree of Life. Although she deems it necessary to reassure readers that it is a novel and admits: “I see life through a certain point of view, a prism of a particular kind of colouration of my own individuality. It’s not always authentic, true to reality, sometimes my imagination wanders off,”33 this is not an act of divesting herself of the obligation of accurately remembering. Rather, fictional elements woven into history is an effective form of social commentary inherited from Yiddish literature, about which she says: “my tradition comes from Yiddish absolutely.”34 It is typical of Yiddish literature to permeate a tale of very bleak social circumstances with humorous or tragic stock figures and characteristics  in addition to other juxtapositions of fiction with fact  as a means of criticising or remarking on the Jewish lot. Stock figures such as the sainted fool (the Toffee Man, for instance, could be nothing else) and dos kleine menschele (Itche Mayer or Krajne Shapsonovitch, both poor but proud) do appear  albeit more rounded out  in the novel. What is interesting, however, is how Rosenfarb takes the tradition a step further. She does not use these manipulations of reality to satirise a situation that it is far too late to change. The commentary entreats the reader to see what life was really like for the doomed Jews of Lodz. She portrays real people who existed within the ghetto and who interact with fictional characters that are drawn so lifelike that they may just as well have been there. Their roles are to serve as imagined witnesses to real events. A further example of the blending of history and memory is the character of the controversial Chaim Rumkowski, the Pressess of the ghetto and head of the German-appointed Judenrat (Jewish Council). His role was ambiguous. In Rosenfarb’s fictional account, even his young wife, not blind to his precarious position, acknowledges that “[h]e was her hangman and her saviour.”35 In Tree of Life, Rosenfarb speculates about the innermost thoughts of a man swathed in megalomania and lost on the path of good intentions. Norman Ravvin describes Rosenfarb’s approach to writing about the Lodz ghetto as a combination of “memory and obligation to the dead.”36 To elaborate on this point, he explains how she “does not set him [Rumkowski] apart from the inhabitants of the ghetto either as a symbolic figure of corrupt power or an untethered ego, but rather depicts him as enmeshed in the general business and chaos of life in the

33

Chava Rosenfarb, telephone interview, 21 Aug 2005. Ibid. Rosenfarb 1985, 826. 36 Norman Ravvin, “Ghost Writing: Chava Rosenfarb’s The Tree of Life,” in Jewish Writing, Identity and Memory (Montreal & Kingston, London and Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 85-100. 88. 34 35

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ghetto.”37 The historical figures do not dominate her novel, but remain on par with all other characters because of readers’ access to their complex inner lives. Ravvin’s argument can be further supported by the novel’s more fantastic elements, which include forays into Rumkowski’s dreams on restless nights, snippets of conversations with his brother over dinner, and episodes of grovelling in front of Hans Biebow.38 Moreover, instead of spotlighting his infamous “Give me your children”39 speech by reproducing it, Rosenfarb concentrates her attention on the effects of the heartbreaking address on the ghetto inhabitants. The chaos that ensues when Rumkowski demands that the inhabitants voluntarily give their children up for deportation reminds the reader that it is the individual lives in the ghetto that matter. It is these ghosts that haunt Rosenfarb and beg her to be remembered; Rumkowski could therefore never be the focus of her story. She tells the untold, unofficial stories of those who were once thought to have mattered very little. Moreover, memory is able to contest history’s predominance by reminding the reader that it was not one man alone who created the crisis of the Lodz ghetto. There was no linear progression that led to an inevitable incarceration, but a series of catastrophic, overlapping factors. Fictionalising the lives of real historical characters is not the only blurring between fact and fiction that occurs within Tree of Life. The map on the inside cover of the Scribe edition, for instance, confuses these distinctions by guiding one not only to the Kripo (criminal police), or the Zgierska footbridge, but also to the fictional Esther’s garret room, Rachel’s second dwelling and Adam’s house in Marysin. The function of the imagined markings on an historical map, although presumably meant to enable the reader to visualise the layout of the ghetto and understand the proportions and dimensions of suffering, lends an authenticity to the characters and acts as a constant reminder of the novel’s shared role as an historical testament. In Tree of Life, history meets memory as an eyewitness recreates a Jewish chronotope in a fiction genre that is alive with realism and detail. Rosenfarb employs actual dates and events as a framework to 37

Ibid. 93. Biebow was a German industrialist who became the Chief Administrator of the Lodz ghetto. Biebow was tried for war crimes by a Lodz-based Polish court after the German defeat. He was executed on April 24, 1947. 39 “Brothers and sisters, hand them over to me! Fathers and mothers, give me your children!” begged Rumkowski on September 4, 1942, a few days after the SS violently raided the ghetto’s hospital and loaded the sick onto trucks, sometimes getting them there by throwing them out the window. The SS demanded that Rumkowski deliver 24,000 people over the next eight days to the train station for deportation. Rumkowski mounted teary-eyed onto a stage and pleaded with the populace for their children and the old people so that those able to work may be spared. He reasoned: “Give into my hands the victims, so that we can avoid having further victims, and a population of a hundred thousand Jews can be preserved. So they promised me: if we deliver our victims by ourselves, there will be peace…” The speech is reproduced in full in Adelson 330. 38

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the novel’s motivation, but the plot is subservient to the characters as well as to the faithful reconstruction of the ghetto world. The focal point of the novel is not suffering and death, but Jewish life; the novel is about how people lived in this time-space: what they longed for, what they thought about, how they were able to create art, why they were drawn into politics, and, most important, how they fought for survival. It is here that the meanings of suffering in the Lodz ghetto begin to crystallise.40 It is at this meeting point of history and memory that victims cease being statistics, begin to take on shape, and then finally breathe in life. These resuscitated beings are more able than history alone to convey what life was really like in the Lodz ghetto, giving the novel “an authority that public history lacks.”41 By translating the novel into English, Rosenfarb revives for contemporary English-speaking audiences the chronotope by “flesh[ing] out the lives” of those in the ghetto and pre-war Lodz, performing a task which museums and monuments with mere artefacts and displays can never achieve.42 In Bakhtinian terms, “[t]ime, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible.”43 Rosenfarb is able to reproduce the atmosphere of the time and space that her character Rachel (the one most resembling Rosenfarb) fears is unachievable. Rachel, a young poet, muses: “I wonder whether it is at all possible to write a novel about the ghetto. How can you write without the perspective of time? On the other hand, if you wait for the perspective of time, it will become impossible to recreate the specific atmosphere of this place.”44 Memory in addition to history has aided Rosenfarb in memorialising the Lodz ghetto. Its resultant authenticity, though not her primary goal, helped Rosenfarb achieve the effect that was for her of utmost importance: to “reproduce the flavour of the place, the flavour

40

In their essay about auto/biographies Manuela Costantino and Susanna Egan argue that these texts are important sources of history because they are able to create a discourse between public and private spheres. See Manuela Costantino and Susanna Egan, “Reverse Migrations and Imagined Communities,” in Women’s Life Writing and Imagined Communities, ed. Cynthia Huff (New York: Routledge 2005), 96-130. 108. Although Tree of Life is admittedly not an auto/biography, the strong connection between her approach and life-writing genres is made evident by Miriam Fuchs’s argument that many writers after enduring a catastrophe write because “they are seeking safe ground and ultimately survival. Consequently they pursue narrative scripts that offer glimpses of reconciliation as well as a means of resistance or protest. Under this pressure, the autobiographical impulse develops according to necessity. The impulse may manifest itself as biography, fiction, or biographical fiction […].” See Miriam Fuchs, “Introduction,” The Text is Myself: Women’s Life Writing and Catastrophe. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 2. 41 Costantino and Egan 105. 42 Ibid. 110. 43 Bakhtin 84. 44 Rosenfarb 1985, 895.

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of the atmosphere.”45 The Tree of Life in its English edition is therefore not only a translation from Yiddish to English; the chronotope provides a forum for a cultural translation from Europe to Canada, and a temporal one from a specific past to the present. By funnelling ghetto life through the eyes of a varied group of protagonists, the reader’s attention is drawn simultaneously to the heteroglossia as well as to the perspective of an entire marginalised community. Every immigrant to Canada has a past and Rosenfarb’s writing of ‘European’ books while in Canada is fulfilling multiculturalism’s mandate. In her most ‘Canadian’ book, Survivors: Seven Short Stories, her characters  despite their new lives in Montreal  never break free of Europe’s shadow. It is precisely in this way that Rosenfarb proves the import of recognising an immigrant’s past. As the unhappy endings of Rosenfarb’s oeuvre attest, the past always informs the present. Canadian immigrants and their heirs cannot and should not be expected to forget their histories. Rosenfarb’s books reclaim the places that were taken away from her and she honours in her writing the ghosts who cry out to her to be commemorated. Rosenfarb’s insistence that Tree of Life is not Canadian in any way other than that it was written in Canada is surprising. If the novel is to be considered ‘CanLit,’ is she afraid that her role as eyewitness will be discredited? Is she apprehensive of a dilution of the European part of her identity and so holds on dearly to her European memories? Would it be a denouncing of her rootedness in the Yiddish literary tradition? Guessing at her motivations is mere speculation. However, by setting her works in Jewish chronotopes, she is preaching the ethics of memory and focussing on life and continuity. To shun her for her responsibility of remembering would be to miss out on Rosenfarb’s contribution to Canadian literature and it would mean that Canada was reneging on its promise of multiculturalism. If Canada wishes to espouse the values of multiculturalism it proclaims to possess, then its writers must have the freedom to inhabit more than one space, even if they lie outside of Canadian borders. Identity in this globalised world of multiplicity is not based on one space alone. Moreover, the realm of literature is also not bound to a single space. Accepting Rosenfarb into Canadian literature would not necessitate an abandonment of the novel’s significance to Yiddish literature. Similar to her blending of history and memory, fact and fiction, Rosenfarb transcends tradition by being inspired by one and by inspiring the other. Tree of Life is therefore a Canadian book for two only seemingly contradictory reasons. First, it contributes to the heteroglossia that make up a multicultural nation not phased by its citizens’ transnationalism. Canada is indeed a nation in 45

Chava Rosenfarb, telephone interview, 21 Aug 2005.

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flux, but that does not necessarily make it porous since, as will be demonstrated in the following, identities, even national ones, are never static. Second, it is a Canadian book because mainstream Canada ought to embrace it in order to live up to its own standards of multiculturalism. Though adopted as the essence of Canadian identity, a multiculturalism that bears elements of transnationalism does not presume to fasten it. The Story of the Diaspora: Narratives of Home as Jewish Identity and a Metaphor for Canadian Multiculturalism In 1947, Chava Rosenfarb excitedly returned to her native Poland. In a 2005 interview, she explained what it was like: The fact that I missed Poland so much and I wanted to go back, helped me satisfy my craving, my longing for Poland. I went there and I was there and that was the end of my affection for Poland. It became, I don’t know how it happened, but Poland became another country. Not my homeland anymore. […] [W]hen I was in the camps and I was away from Poland, I missed Poland very much but of course it was Jewish Poland that I missed. I didn’t miss the anti-Semitic Poland. I missed my home part. I felt such a longing for Poland that finally after liberation, shortly after, I went to Poland. […] It was completely foreign to me. I couldn’t even enter the apartment where we lived as a family. It killed a lot in me. The presence of the Poles who were still anti-Jewish, and unpleasant, it made a big impression on me, the whole thing. I was quite happy to leave. That was the end of it, the end of my sentiment for Poland.46

Hitler’s army not only obliterated lives but also permanently deformed the connection those who survived had to specific places. Homes were destroyed so that no return could ever be possible  except in terms of longing and imagination. Poland for Rosenfarb was never the same again, and the distinction between the Lodz she remembers and loved as a teenager and the one she went back to visit as a survivor are worlds apart. As a result of this jarring realisation that her first home is gone forever, she separates the two clearly in her writing. This disentanglement of Jewish Lodz and post-war Lodz allows her continued access to a lost home. In so doing, Jewish Canadian writer Chava Rosenfarb is one of many artists who have demonstrated that there are numerous places that can be considered ‘home’ in the Jewish imagination. The homeland that a Diaspora inevitably

46

Chava Rosenfarb, telephone interview, 21 Aug 2005.

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longs for is not necessarily Eretz Israel.47 Although some may argue that Jewish multiplicity will create a loss of common experience and a dilution of religious meaning,48 it must be remembered that there was never any one way to be a Jew  and yet Judaism still survived several millennia. In Jewish Frontiers, Gilman outlines how the State of Israel was not able to provide for Diaspora Jews, as promised, a stable identity. He writes: Nineteenth-and twentieth-century Zionism promised to solve the ‘problem’ of diaspora Jews. The problem was defined as the inevitable alienation experienced by Jews attempting to become citizens in nations that designated them inherently unassimilable. Zionism promised to provide a constant, unconflicted identity for them by making them citizens of a new nation state during an age in which national citizenship provided the primary point of identification.49

According to George Steiner in “Our Homeland, Our Text,” part of the difficulty in supplying this fixed Jewish identity is that Jews are accustomed to constituting a ‘homeless’ nation. For many Diaspora Jews, he argues, it is “[t]he text [that] is home; each commentary a return.”50 Homi Bhabha would call this “writing the nation.”51 It is in Jewish texts such as the Torah or the Talmud where real Jewish ‘at-homeness’ exists, and it can be added that even contemporary Jewish writing contributes to textual Jewish identity by propagating Jewish chronotopes. Setting literary works in a variety of time-spaces where there was a significant Jewish presence widens the scope of the ‘at-homeness’ by contributing to the collective memory. It also suggests, as expressed by Shirley Geok-lin Lim, that “home is the place where our stories are told.”52 Zionism may be perceived as the lamentable absence of Jews from their Homeland, but Diasporism, as evidenced in the work of Chava Rosenfarb, among others who employ Jewish chronotopes, fills in that absence with life-filled stories set in other Jewish time-spaces.

47

See James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). In Routes, Clifford bases his definition of Diaspora on that of William Safran’s. He claims that two of the necessary criteria are that there must be an original centre from which a group was dispersed and that they retain myths, nostalgia and histories from and about that place (147). See also: William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora 1.1 (1991): 83-99. 48 See, for example, Zvi Gitelman, “The Decline of the Diaspora Jewish Nation: Boundaries, Content and Jewish Identity,“ Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, and Society, 4.2 (1998): 112-132. 49 Gilman 1. 50 George Steiner, “Our Homeland, the Text,” Salmagundi 66 (1985): 4-25, 5. 51 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2000), 140. 52 Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Among the White Moon Faces (New York: The City Universityof New York, 1996), 230.

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Taking up Steiner’s argument that Jewishness is not only at home in the text, but is most at home as the text, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi argues in “Our Homeland, the Text…Our Text the Homeland: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination” that the purpose of Zion to those in the Diaspora is to symbolise cultural hope and longing; it is the substance of dreams and poetry. The argument proposed is that “if exile is narrative, to particularize the end of the narrative in a specific place and time is to provide a form of epic closure which threatens the storytelling enterprise itself  an enterprise which remained alive, like Scheherazade, by suspending endings.”53 Concurring with Walter Benjamin’s warning that to be restored to Zion, Eden, or any other utopia is not the meaning of messianic redemption and what is of importance is how the present actively remembers the past in an interruption of history, Ezrahi argues that only a tragic ending is possible when a Zionist dream is finally attained. The goal should therefore be the telling of a variety of stories of a living, evolving, fluctuating, persisting people, who continue to create, gather, and pass on new stories. Gilman’s frontier model, whereby he suggests reconsidering the Diaspora as a valuable asset to Judaism, is supported by this suggestion of Ezrahi’s that the political problems Israel has faced since its inception is the cause of a dream meeting reality. That there is a Diaspora, however, continues to regenerate the unending story of the Jewish people and provides as such continuous material for the Jewish identity in the present. The (metaphorical) longing for Zion has not stopped since the inauguration of the State of Israel. Ezrahi, however, is not arguing that the dream should never have come to fruition. What is concluded is that “we need to keep ‘arrival’ from becoming the place of death; how to reopen the narrative so that narrative itself can continue  and so that one can hear the suppressed, the silenced voices  the memory in the stones.”54 Because the idea of Zion survives better as a text, what needs to be written into the Jewish story is both the continuing role of the evolving Diaspora as well as Israel’s own perpetual change and dynamism. Only when the Diaspora is valued for its provision of varying experience will Jewish identity continue to reinvent itself in positive ways. In their article “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin recommend a self-reflexive multicultural Israel, that is, a nation-state that is conscious of sharing space with others in an imitation of the Jewish frontiers at which they had historically lived before there was

53

54

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “Our Homeland, the Text…Our Text the Homeland: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination,” Michigan Quarterly Review 31 (1992): 463-497. 467-8. Ibid. 491.

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a Jewish state. The Boyarins call this the “diasporic consciousness.”55 Their proposal is a call for Gilman’s Jewish frontiers within Israel and not only in the Diaspora: “We suggest that an Israel that reimports diasporic consciousness  a consciousness of a Jewish collective as one sharing space with others, devoid of exclusivist and dominating power  is the only Israel that could answer […a] call for a species-wide care without eradicating cultural difference.”56 Similar to how Paul Gilroy’s seminal study, The Black Atlantic, insists that ethnic, racial and cultural identities are made up of “the living memory of the changing same,”57 a recognition that identity is always in tension with ‘having been,’ ‘being,’ and ‘becoming,’ the Boyarins also claim that how the culture reads its narratives and how it understands the changing dialogues with these narratives will govern the relationship between them. Identity is erratic and discursive and must not be viewed as static or fixed. It is precisely Zion’s status as real place that poses a threat to a dynamism that acknowledges that all identities are in flux and are always affected by how the present relates to the past. For Israel to accept the “living memory of the changing same” could help re-import to Israel the “diasporic consciousness” advised by the Boyarins. Everyone lives in a continual present that must redeem the past; those in the present have the moral obligation to interrupt history and search through the remains of the past. Instead of expecting Israel to provide Diaspora Jews with a stable identity, the Diaspora’s multiculturalism can act as a model for a multiethnic Israel. It can be thus deduced, after examining several concurring theories, that Jewish narratives tie the Diaspora together through collective memory; Jewish narratives are the Jewish identity. “Who are the Jews?” asks Gilman, “Those who understood themselves as Jews at specific moments in time. Does this definition change? It is constantly shifting and constantly challenged […].”58 This instability designates why Jewish chronotopes in literature are of great significance. Space and time are inseparable from Jewish identity because Jews travelled through and across both, leading Jonathan Boyarin to conclude in Storm from Paradise: “The basic point remains: interaction among Jews need not be based on all Jews living together in the same space. If we devote more of our energies toward resurrecting our ancestors, then Jews can derive much of the interactive sustenance we need from living together in time.”59 By continually 55

Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 693-725. 713. 56 Ibid. 57 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 198. 58 Gilman 25. 59 Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 128.

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engaging in Jewish chronotopes, such as the Lodz ghetto, thereby necessitating the fusion of past and present, a constant revision of Jewish identity occurs. It all begins with storytelling. The arguments that have been presented in favour of a Diasporic spatial history comprised of unofficial histories that cross space and time is an analogy for Canada’s policy of multiculturalism. Canada’s multiculturalism is not unlike the Jewish Diaspora: they both bear spatial histories that recognise the overlapping and competing narratives of a population that cannot be linked through blood. Canada is not a British nation, despite having originally tried to limit immigration of non-whites and other undesirables. Canada’s promise in 1982 was to officially endorse the concept that Canada has not only a British past, but takes on, with every new immigrant, the unofficial history of each new member. In return, Canada, once notorious for an alleged lack of nationness, gains the identity it relentlessly sought for so long. A history that disrupts the deterministic understanding of nineteenth-century history also disrupts the nineteenth-century modern notion of nation. With the adoption of spatial history, a new concept of a nation needs to be formulated and the only chance rests in a multicultural nation whose core consciousness encourages transnational spaces. Canada’s history  like any other spatial history  is made up of interlinking, overlapping, interrelational histories belonging to a variety of peoples and cultures, each with its own story to tell, its own way to tell that story, and its own experience of Canada. Narrating these stories is how each cultural group can learn, in James Clifford’s words “to live inside, with a difference.”60 The goal of multiculturalism should not be to “eradicat[e] cultural difference,” but to, as Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin would have it, learn how to “shar[e] space with others, devoid of exclusivist and dominating power.”61 To encourage such domination would be an attempt to close the book on the never-ending stories of each cultural group. Canada as a multicultural nation is a discursive entity; the narratives actively adopted to prop it up  from all parts of society  then become its (renewable) identity. In Can.Lit., an early 1960s poem by Canadian Earle Birney, the poet grumbles: “it’s only by our lack of ghosts / we’re haunted.”62 As was common at the time, he is criticising Canada for having too much geography and not enough history.63 However, it is evident in twenty-first century novels such as Tree of Life, which deal with questions of Diaspora and belonging, that Canadian litera60

Clifford 251. Boyarin and Boyarin 1993, 713. 62 Earle Birney, “Can.Lit.,” Ghost in the Wheels: Selected Poems (Toronto: McClelland and Steward, 1977), 49. 63 This quip is attributed to former Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. 61

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ture has changed. Rosenfarb has shown that Canada decidedly does not suffer from a lack of ghosts. On the contrary, there is an abundance of ghosts who personify a variety of collective memories. Her works have demonstrated how helpful ghosts are in supporting cultural identity through bringing the stories of the past and the present together. Canadian literature has changed because it is beginning to accept even the ghosts that may not be attached to Canadian soil. The Canadian population is comprised of many different Diasporas, whereby members of each are called upon to remember, if they so wish, time-spaces necessary to cultivating a cultural identity in the present. When Canada adopts new members in the form of immigration, it also adopts their stories. Writing these stories, however, is not only about identity-formation and connecting to the past. It is also about education and learning from one another. For those who want to be ‘just Canadian,’ the national identity as a multicultural country means engaging in alternative and constantly shifting narratives, and learning to be open-minded about and interested in the varying world-views of others. Conclusion: Chava Rosenfarb’s Tree of Life and The Future of ‘CanLit’ Similar to how Jewishness is found in the text, Canadianness is expressed in the continually shifting collection of Canadian literature  an evolution that also demarcates the Canadian identity as dynamic. Because Canada has exploited, since the 1960s, its national canon as a representative of its ideology and identity,64 a contemporary Canadian literature that demonstrates history as spatial and which is made up of interrelational pasts acts as a reminder that Canada is not and never was monocultural. A multicultural Canada as represented through Canadian literature is ideally one that includes all the time-spaces whence its population’s stories and memories were formed, thus embracing a future of ethnic, racial and linguistic pluralism and transnationalism. One revisits the past in order to ground his or her identity in a space and time; identity is who people are and historiography is how they came to be.65 The suffix ‘graphy’ suggests that what is written needs to be read, underscoring the 64

Canadian literature has always had a conspicuous role in substantiating the Canadian identity. Its national canon was used as a representative of its ideology and identity ever since Canada’s active attempts to rise above its marginality led to the creation of a literary culture and the institutionalisation of Canadian literature in schools and universities in the 1960s. A hastily assembled Canadian canon was meant to provide the nation with an identity. However, a revision is greatly needed to represent in the 21st century a Canadian literature that honestly reflects the constitutional multicultural state. See, for example, Robert Lecker, Making it Real: The Canonization of EnglishCanadian Literature (Concord, ON: Anansi, 1995). 65 Gilman 3.

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importance of narrative to identity. Community is not bound to place, and the identity of a place is also unfixed.66 There is no solitary or central story behind the present Canadian identity with its implicit ‘hyphen,’ and tales from the times and spaces of Canadians’ various pasts are all worth hearing. Canadian literature needs to represent the identity provided to Canada through its constitutional multiculturalism by including these stories. By demonstrating the myriad of ways to be Jewish, Tree of Life analogises the plethora of ways to be Canadian. To be Canadian by the alleged stipulations of multiculturalism is to house and encourage a range of competing voices. The heteroglossia qualifying each other and forbidding dissolution into a single monologic truth further support Rosenfarb’s book as a Canadian novel because the emphasis is on discourse and dialogue, holding that identity is never monolithic. The argument for Tree of Life as a Canadian work is thus sustained by an understanding of multiculturalism as a renegotiation of the past also subject to dialogue. Uncovering these layers of unofficial histories becomes a moral duty because of the injustice of their burial. It is subsequently evident that books by other Jewish Canadian women writers appearing in Yiddish, English and French reveal not the state of a poorly co-ordinated Jewish literature, but rather represent a pluralist set-up fostering precisely this multiplicity. Tree of Life’s re-publishing in three volumes by Wisconsin Press since 2004, which led to Rosenfarb’s May 2006 award of an honorary doctorate from the University of Lethbridge (the first honorary degree bestowed upon a Yiddish-language writer in Canada), demonstrates that Canadians and Europeans are becoming more interested in the question of diversity and cultural citizenship, and are eager to embrace an ethnic identity for its promise of belonging that can challenge the anonymity of a globalised and hybridised world. Spatial histories, as exemplified by the chronotope (and in this case, the Jewish chronotope), illustrate how borders are open and identities are manifold. This is why most Canadians would be willing to accept a description of Rosenfarb’s work as ‘CanLit,’ even if Rosenfarb is not. Because Canadians  perhaps more so than Europeans unaccustomed to a multicultural ideology67  believe that ethnicity positively affirms a sense of belonging, Canada’s multiculturalism ensures that national and ethno-religious identities are not, as they once were for the Jews of Lodz, mutually exclusive. As 66

See, for example, Doreen Massey, “Double Articulation: A Place in the World,” in Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question, ed. Angelika Bammer (Indianapolis and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 110-122. 67 This is best illustrated with the case of Michael Ondaatje, who, after winning the Booker Prize in 1992 for the novel The English Patient was called in the British press, among other things, “a Sri Lankan poet, domiciled in Canada.” Quoted in: Gillian Roberts, “Prizing the Nation: Canadian Writers and the Booker Prize” 4 Oct 2003, http://ah.brookes.ac.uk/conferences/calp/papers/ roberts.pdf .

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an ‘invader-settler’ society, built by two founding nations (on previously inhabited land) but dominated by one of them and then abandoned by both, Canada’s beginnings were humbly not conducive to the cultivation of a national character. Criticised for its contrived efforts at forging an identity, Canada has always been, to use Anthony D. Smith’s term, a “nation by design.”68 How a nation wishes to be perceived is the single most important factor in creating an identity; it is a representation of how the country wishes to be, thereby translating much better into a national ideology than would drab  possibly even incriminating  historical facts.69 Canadians like to think of themselves as honest, brave, modest, law-abiding, and polite. The current tendency is to add to the list of fine attributes that Canadians are tolerant and welcoming of all cultures. By calling Tree of Life: A Novel about Life in the Lodz Ghetto a Canadian book, Canadians are attempting to live up to the evolving, non-static promise of multiculturalism, so that Jews, as well as other ethnic, religious or minority groups, will  at least as a constitutional stance  never again have to doubt to which nation they belong.

68

69

Please see, for instance, Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno, Las Vegas, London: University of Nevada Press, 1991). Daniel Francis, National Dreams: Myth, Memory, and Canadian History (Vancouver: Arsenal Press, 1997), 10.

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Labour Asian Can: Grammar, Movement and the Institution Larissa Lai

Can Asian? This paper considers the grammatical status of ‘Asian Canadian’ and its permutations ‘Can Asian’, ‘Asian Can,’ ‘Asiancy’ and ‘Asian Canadian Literature’. My purpose is to think through both the potential and the already accomplished entry of Asian Canadian Studies or Literature into the academy, and, somewhat elliptically, my own place within it as a writer, organizer and academic at this particular historical juncture. To be given power through a term by which one has been historically oppressed puts one in a altered relationship to that oppression, and that is the problem I want think through here. I want to begin by considering the work that has been done from inside the academy in order to think through the relationship of the term to work done outside, or on the margins. To ask what institutionalization means is also to ask questions of form, structure, boundary, political commitment and alliance. In his well-known article “A Long Labour: The Protracted Birth of Asian Canadian Literature,” Donald Goellnicht focuses on the entry of Asian Canadian literary studies into the academy. He acknowledges an intention to focus on the academy rather than arts (or activist) communities.1 If one of the strategies of community-making in recent decades has been speaking for oneself, then this stance makes ethical sense from Goellnicht’s point of view. I’d like consider, however, how historicizing ‘beside’ might open up an understanding of ‘Asian Can’ that complicates the boundary between the academy and its ‘outsides.’ Goellnicht figures the entry of Asian Canadian Literature into the academy as a birth, an empowering arrival. But if “Asian Canadian Literature,” as a noun, is the product of a “long labour,” a rough beast slouching into the Canadian academy after a “protracted birth,” then it seems important to ask: Who is its mother? Or alternately, if Asian Canadian (literary studies) “languished in the wilderness” in the 60s and 70s, while Asian American literary studies rapidly 1

Donald Goellnicht, “A Long Labour: The Protracted Birth of Asian Canadian Literature,” Essays on Canadian Writing 72 (2000): 1-42.

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rose,2 then where is that wilderness and what’s been going on there? The metaphorical ‘womb’ or wilderness in that essay functions as an interestingly problematic site of action, which, in the frame of the piece, lead to the joyous moment of birth, the arrival of the discipline in human(ist) shape. Tara Lee has productively explored the womb of Goellnicht’s article as a nation space that generates national subjects, and asks how to escape or exceed it. For her, the womb encloses.3 Without waxing too pastoral, what I propose to do in this paper is to consider this feminized space as offering an alternate spatiality for ‘Asian Canadian’ and its movements. It the spirit of Roy Miki’s coin ‘Asiancy’ I want to consider its verbed possibilities as a strategy for keeping open the ways in which it might be programmed into institutions. I use the “Protracted Birth” article as a starting point because of the productive groundwork it lays. The Goellnicht piece largely articulates the dearth of Asian Canadian in relation to Asian American oppositional politics and its place in the array of US ethnic studies programs, a problem which Henry Yu and Guy Beauregard have explored in some depth in a recent issue of Amerasia.4 Goellnicht suggests that the confrontational politics Asian American advocates engaged against Eurocentric curricula and the agon of anti-Vietnam war protests catalyzed an (implicitly masculine) firming of Asian American Studies that could take a solid place in the American academy once its walls had been breached. He contrasts this with Canadian multicultural “inclusion” – too gentle for strong ethnic studies programs to define themselves against. He suggests that there is no founding trauma, and asks whether this “cripples” the term “Asian Canadian” or whether it produces liberation in “wide-open self-fashioning.”5 The implicit feminizing of Asian Canadian experience is an interesting gesture in light of the range of narrative possibilities. The violence of legalized Canadian racism  from the Head Tax to the Chinese Exclusion Act, to the Japanese Canadian Internment, to the Komagata Maru incident, to name a few  has offered plenty of injustice for Canadian anti-racist workers to define themselves against, as indeed, we have done on numerous occasions. These instances may be less military than many American instances, but they certainly have been ‘firm’ enough to prompt oppositional response. I’d like to suggest, however, that the gendering of the term is only productive inside a framework that requires masculinity for nationalist purposes. I am just as reluctant to categorize ‘Asian Cana2

Ibid. 3. Tara Lee, “Promising Transnational Births: The Womb and Cyborg Politics,” in Asian Canadian Literature. Diss. Simon Fraser University 2006. 4 Henry Yu and Guy Beauregard, eds., “Canada: Beyond the 49th Parallel,” Special issue of Amerasia Journal 33.2 (2007). 5 Goellnicht 3. 3

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dian’ as the fluttering feminine response to ‘Asian American’s’ masculine canon. I think it might be equally useful to interrogate the value of ‘opposition’ as one value among many, and to ask what kind of labour opposition does. I propose a framework which recognizes power and productivity, or what Fred Wah would call ‘generation’ in the mobility and grammatical instability of the term. Rather than constructing ‘Asian Can’ in deficient relation to a practice of ‘Asian Am,’ I would like to interrogate what Asian ‘Can’ do  I hestitate to say ‘on its own terms’ because it seems terribly isolationist to assume a boundedness precisely where I want to posit openness and mobility. Rather, I ask what its connections and relations are, historically, at present and in relation to Asian Canadian (studies, literature, practice) ‘to come,’ to emphasize its potential for embracing the unexpected. ‘Asian Canadian’ opposes productively, but it also does coalitional work. I would like to argue that ‘Asian Canadian’ has been one productive term among many that circulated and activated in the latter half of the last century, that rather than being the product of someone else’s labour  whether the academy’s or an unnamed mother’s  it laboured inside and beside other terms  ‘person of colour,’ ‘working class,’ ‘middle class,’ ‘feminist,’ ‘queer,’ ‘First Nations,’ ‘lesbian,’ ‘gay,’ ‘transgendered,’ ‘anti-racist’  terms that circulated together and separately and did different work at particular moments sometimes in concert with Asian Canadian, sometimes in opposition, sometimes at cross-purposes, sometimes in coalition, sometimes in excess. The juxtaposition of these different kinds of labour need not add up to an institutional object. And in fact it is important to acknowledge the extent to which Asian Canadian cultural practice developed on the ground, ‘from below,’ so to speak, sometimes with institutional support, but catalyzed at the levels of political protest and art production, and not programatically. I figure this ground neither as womb nor wood, but as stable structure floating on water  island, oil rig, or refugee boat, perhaps. I would like to return to a strategy of that late 80s early 90s moment, in which a kind of self-reflection produces a different relationship to history, one that takes impression without totalizing or institutionalizing, one that produces subjects differently, while still recognizing the work of grassroots collectivity. Personal Histories The year 1990 seemed to me to be a turning point in the public discourse around race in Canada. I can never be sure, however, if the turning point was indeed a public one, or merely a shift in my own personal thinking, which, once it had settled to its new level, found reflections of itself whereever I looked. The cata155

lytic moments did not necessarily circulate around the term ‘Asian Canadian,’ but rather returned ‘race’ to the people marked by such a notion, but to empower rather than to oppress. In 1983, Makeda Silvera made an address to the Women and Words conference in Toronto, foregrounding issues of race and racism in Canadian writing. In 1989, the lack of representation by First Nations writers and writers of colour were protested both at the Writer's Union and at PEN Canada. At the time, it seemed as though there was a particular energy in the air, an excitement among young people of colour, and young Asian Canadians of my acquaintance in particular, that something was about to happen, something for which we did not yet have the language, but for which we had ample energy and interest. Since 1986, I had been in touch with Jim Wong-Chu regarding an anthology of Chinese-Canadian poetry that was later to become Many-Mouthed Birds. In the spring of 1990, Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe was published. I remember trouping responsibly off to the launch to discover a community abuzz with an excitement I had not experienced up until that point. It was also at that book launch that I first met Paul Wong and Elspeth Sage, who were putting together an exhibit of film, video and photo-based work called Yellow Peril: Reconsidered. Jim told me that they were looking to hire an assistant curator and that I might consider asking them about it. It was not until at least a month into the job that I began to realize I was engaged in an odd but very exciting community romance, one fraught with anger, suspicion and jealousy, but also burning with a desire and a will to create a new world quite unlike the one that any of us had grown-up in. In retrospect, I think of the flowering anti-racist movement of the nineties as very much a youth movement, which I think is part of the reason why it seems possible to talk about it historically. Many of us involved at that moment were in our late teens and early twenties at that time. Of course, the stage had been set through the long and painstaking struggles of an earlier generation, something some of us recognized and acknowledged and some of us did not. What is worth considering here is the doubling of personal and historical movement that energizes rather than consolidating, or programmatizing. What would it take, in the contemporary moment, to produce such an energy among students? For the first month of the project, I was the only person on staff. A month later, two others were hired on UIC top-off (Section 25) grants  Anne Jew as publicist and Kevin Louis as graphic designer. Two others, Effie Pow and Jean Lum, volunteered their time and came regularly to the office in Paul Wong's Main Street apartment. The project was exciting because it was disruptive, empowering and community building. Relationships were built as a corollary to the articulation of a repressed history and the production of artwork and writing that addressed it. Such building occurred, of course, in a particular national and local 156

framework. The Multiculturalism Act had been passed in 1988, shifting the terms of articulation on both legal and cultural terrains. But what I want to emphasize here is the generation of artwork and collectivity put in to action by selfempowered subjects. Art Works Without going into a blow by blow description of the pieces, which Paul Wong does in his catalogue essay, I would like to point to a few streams, which I perceive to have been taken up further in other contexts. There are those which articulate family and community histories with a view to articulating lived experience that had not, up till then had much representation within mainstream or alternative media. These include Midi Onodera’s Displaced View, Sharyn Yuen’s Jook Kaak, Daisy Lee’s The Morning Zoo, and Anthony Chan’s Chinese Cafes in Rural Saskatchewan. The community building impact of these pieces should not be underestimated, nor should the historical preservation aspect. Yuen’s Jook Kaak, a visual piece constructed from old family photos and handmade paper with handwritten text, is cognizant of the way we tend to look at history  the ancientness of the photographs contrasts sharply with the diaristic immediacy of the text  “The intensity of the moment was overwhelming. It lasted all of 45 minutes.”6 We understand at once the huge gap in time, space and longing between the China side of the family and the Canada side. At the same time, the work resists being perceived as an artifact of a time long past, of a culture long dead, because of the text. The slippage between intensity of emotion and time  the length of absence and the length of the visit itself  demands a reassessment of our understanding of our history as dead and assimilation as effective. Onodera’s video similarly insists on its own subjectivity. The Japanese portions of the tape are consciously not translated, so that how one regards them depends very much on one’s own education and background. Implicitly, it both demonstrates the frustrations and losses a sansei child feels in terms of her relationship with her grandmother, and holds non-Japanese-speaking viewers at arms length. There are other strategies. There is Jin-me Yoon’s “(Im)permanent (Re)collection,” which places unexpectedly familiar and familial items in an museum-style drawers to critique of the Western propensity towards collection and categorization, and how fragmenting it can be for those whose lives are collected and categorized  those in fact, whose bodies are collected and catego6

Paul Wong ed., Yellow Peril: Reconsidered (Vancouver: On Edge 1990), 51.

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rized through the official immigration process that erases them as full subjects by flattening complex lives to photographs and bureaucratic jargon, in the very moment of accepting them as citizens.7 In “That” and “Found,” Henry Tsang’s prods at pop wisdom about race and desire as a way of encouraging a burgeoning community to look at itself is interesting in that it reflects both the wisdom and the naivete of the discussions around inter-racial romance that were a marked feature of that moment.8 These works address precisely the instability of the terms through which their exhibition is organized. What is at work here is the incomplete and tenuous production of selves in relation to repressed history. Images, documents and modes of representation are retrieved from the past in order to produce the future differently. These works offer an alternate temporality  what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze has posited as a “time of minority” 9 is which we are constantly in the act of becoming. Strategy Gaps What I would like to talk about here is the gap between the strategies deployed by individual artists and those deployed curatorially or organizationally at events such as Yellow Peril. The future is full of possibilities, and there is no requisite that we all take the same path. At the root of this discussion, is a desire for community, however variously defined, and the concrete forms of empowerment it brings. Yellow Peril did not take place in a vaccuum. In fact, there were two precursors  a video series screened at Vancouver’s Video In in 1987 called Asian New World, and a 16-artist exhibition  curated by Paul Wong through On Edge, the production company he ran with Elspeth Sage  for the Chisendale Gallery in London, England in 1988. It is my impression, however, that these two shows are not remembered in the same way that Yellow Peril: Reconsidered is remembered. I think it would be worth researching to see if one can ascertain what made the summer of 1990 particularly catalytic or if that is merely my impression because that moment was such a personal turning point for me. What I do remember is that the previous summer, a massive women’s film and video festival called In Visible Colours had been organized under the auspices of the Women in Focus society by an independent team of women of colour curators 7

Ibid. 48. Ibid. 43. 9 John Rajchman, “Diagram and Diagnosis,” in Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, ed. Elizabeth Grosz (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1999), 42-54. 45. 8

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and organizers including Lorraine Chan and Zainub Verjee. So perhaps it was a confluence of these things  the discussions at Women and Words, PEN and the Writers’ Union, Jim Wong-Chu’s work around the ACWW and Many-Mouthed Birds, the publication of Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe, the In Visible Colours Film and Video Festival  I am sure there are other people out there with other memories. The strategy behind Yellow Peril was a consciously confrontational one. Its express purpose was to take into the predominantly white and middle-class artistrun centres work that they did not traditionally show. The question of racism was central. Hanging in the air at that moment, or course, were all the debates about affirmative action. The dialectic tension was framed in terms of ‘quality’ on the one hand, and the Eurocentrism of contemporary Western aesthetics on the other. In retrospect, I think that one of the great losses of that moment was that very little discourse around what that artwork was doing, in a critical sense, was generated, in spite of calls from some artists strongly encouraging it. At the end of his essay in the Yellow Peril catalogue, Richard Fung writes “Whatever formal strategies Asian film or video markers choose, we need to situate and question ourselves as subjects. Not how we are seen, but how we see. We must center our work on our own problems, desires and foibles.”10 Art practice produced both subjects and objects  agented actors and art works. And yet somehow the greater focus fell to the production of frameworks. Obviously, the production of frameworks is important and worth thinking about, but what remains is an analysis of the small and contradictory movements of art and community building practice itself, which was produced through a useful instability that could not be named in the curatorial frameworks. As the decade wore on, the recognition that ‘we’ is a complicated idea deepened. The model of the subject as constituted through a range of intersecting oppressions and privileges rather than a single one necessitated the production of other venues in which to expore the intersections. Self Not Whole, organized by Henry Tsang and Lorraine Chan, was an exhibit of Asian-Canadian visual art and writing organized for the Chinese Cultural Centre, based in Vancouver’s Chinatown.11 It aimed at bringing questions of contemporary Chinese-Canadian art practice into a community space unlikely to seek such work on its own. While it might be an over-generalization to say that the CCC is a venue that tends to look to Asia for its notions of what constitutes art, it was nonetheless a radical move to bring in work produced in Vancouver by Chinese-Canadian artists 10

Richard Fung, “Multiculturalism reconsidered”, in Yellow Peril: Reconsidered, ed. Paul Wong (Vancouver: On Edge, 1990), 17-19. 19. 11 Henry Tsang, Self Not Whole: Cultural Identity and Chinese-Canadian Artists in Vancouver (Vancouver: Chinese Cultural Centre, 1991).

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working in a contemporary idiom. The catalogue, produced in Chinese and English, underscores which lines of communication were intended as primary. Interestingly, it might also be thought of as anticipating the pressures of an expanded globalization, in which the complex movements of bodies, technology, finance and affect are configured not through opposition but through flow. Unlike Yellow Peril, consciously conceived as an in-your-face reaction to a dominant Canadian national discourse, Self Not Whole purported to throw open the question of what we mean when we say ‘Chinese,’ ‘Canadian,’ ‘self,’ and ‘community.’ It pointed to the varied backgrounds and experiences of the artists and organizers, as well as the cultural and historical specificity of the venue itself to suggest that these categories are by no means stable. To live on the hyphen in ‘Chinese-Canadian’ is to live in a constant state of flux, to be without a resting place, without a homeplace, constantly in motion and constantly in question. Its questions, in other words, are the same questions that fall on the table as we think through the question of academic institutionalization. How are identity markers inflected by the spaces in which they do their work? How then should we strategize that work, given the range of possibilities for reception and re-enactment? Thinking through Goellnicht’s notion that opposition is a necessary precursor to ‘academic birth,’ it is worth asking whether Yellow Peril necessarily preceded Self Not Whole. Two subsequent exhibitions, Memory and Desire (1992) and Racy Sexy (1993), sought to engage certain questions which rose organically within some of the earlier race-focussed work. In so doing, they did not deny or undo the antiracist interests of their predecessors, but rather built on it. Memory and Desire came into being on the heels of a Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition of British South Asian photography called Fabled Territories, curated by Sunil Gupta. Memory and Desire’s implementation was largely the result of protests by a group called Local Colour, which questioned the Vancouver Art Gallery’s looking elsewhere to find critical work by people of colour. They were concerned about the lack of outreach into the local South Asian community for Fabled Territories, the lack of publicity in general and the absence of an opening. The content of Memory and Desire, however, was not so much confrontative as evocative. Engaging myth and family, clothing and old photographs, the women who took part in this exhibit identified themselves as ‘women of culture’  steering the focus away from a perception of race essentialism located in its predecessors. It insisted on and laid out some of the complexities of lives lived here, in Vancouver. Rather than taking aim at white oppression, it focussed on the mapping of history. Racy Sexy was strategically similar in that its organizers chose a what they called ‘a universal human emotion’  desire  as the focus for the show, and its 160

intersection with then pressing questions about race and identity. Karin Lee and Henry Tsang write: “What are our ideas of beauty and how are we influenced by media images? With whom do we identify and why? How and why does our desire differ from others? Were experiences common in different communities, and with those of different culture, class and sexual backgrounds? Finally, how did culture and race influence our sexuality, and vice versa?”12 The exhibit took the brave step of inviting members of other marginalized communities into the Chinese Cultural Centre, in conjunction with other community centres. Its coalition building intent was strong. Over the course of its organizing, Racy Sexy suffered painfully from unresolved differences among the organizers, and from lack of trust, which had had so little time to build. No one denied that the project was influenced by earlier work done in Vancouver and Toronto (most notably Desh Pardesh, a South Asian Canadian festival of contemporary art and culture) spearheaded by gay and lesbian organizers of colour. But some felt that this influence was not clearly articulated enough, or reflected in the make-up of the organizing commitee or the festival program. This problem was by no means a new one  women in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s faced it, Black women in a white feminist movement faced it. In this moment, it was queers in an anti-racist movement facing it. Discussion around the hierarchy of race oppression, and the problem of living at the intersection of two or more marginalizations raised the question of the fragmentation of the subject, and pointed more sharply than ever to the social constructedness of identity categories. The ‘we’ that circulated through a range of arts and activist community locations became increasingly unstable. With these questions of identity thrown so viscerally into contest from within, just at the historical moment when charges of ‘political correctness,’ and ‘censorship’ began its neoconservative assault from the ‘outside,’ it became increasingly difficult to cohere and to organize. Some new tools were clearly necessary, but what would they look like? In 1995, Glen Alteen, Aiyyana Maracle and Haruko Okano organized, through the grunt gallery, a project called Half Bred. It highlighted three special categories, just as many identity-focussed shows had in the past. These were ‘bisexuality,’ ‘miscegenation,’ and ‘transgender.’ I say ‘special’ because these were identity categories of the borderlands, ones that emphasized more intensely than ever the unfixed quality of identity categories, yet depended on the rhetoric of identity for their existence. When Mark Tadao Nakada speaks, for instance, of having to raise his hand twice during an in-class racial census in grade school, or Ivan Elizabeth Coyote speaks of his perilous navigation through a series of iden12

Karin Lee and Henry Tsang “Racy Sexy—An Utopian Collaboration?” in Racy Sexy: Race, Culture, Sexuality, ed. Remick Ho et al. (Vancouver: Chinese Cultural Centre, 1995), 5.

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tities  boy, girl, dyke, butch  the listener/viewer may be inspired by the honesty of the moment, but (s)he is also made aware of the violence inherent within the empowerment of earlier moments, even as they set the stage for this one. What exactly does a show like Half Bred call for? In response to Queer City, another project of the same year organized through the Western Front, I wrote a piece expressing concern that the abandonment of the terms ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ in favour of the more inclusive, reclamatory term ‘queer,’ began a downward slide into the very same liberalism that so many of us were so critical of from the very beginning. And critical for good reason. We understood that liberalism, with its roots in the European Enlightenment, while it posited the ideal of universalism, still privileged, through access to the means of discourse, those who hold power in the first place  mostly straight, mostly white, mostly men. Futures I do think an excellent project would be a careful revisitation of the individual works in the shows discussed above. It is particularly worth considering questions of strategies at the various scales of production. What individual artists consider and put in to motion necessarily occurs at a different scale and with different tensions than what curators and organizers need to consider. I want to be very aware that these acts are always both political and creative. Attentiveness to both of these streams is useful in terms of thinking about the entry of Asian Canadian Studies into the institution at the present moment. It seems to me that what is productive about art practice as a mode of subject-producing is that it admits contradiction in a way that organizing work must also, although contradiction sits less comfortably with the latter. In retrospect, I have a great deal of admiration for the organizers of these various projects. Each project was a brave step in furthering a community discourse, and each took risks  and paid a price  in making these steps. Many of the people involved in these projects have moved away from organizing or dropped out of the picture altogether. This, I think, is testimony to just how grueling some of those discussions were. Other generations have risen since to organize such events as the now annual Asian Heritage Month Festival, or the Indigenous Women’s Show at the Roundhouse in Vancouver. Massive neoliberal backlash against the activities and organizing of earlier in the 1990s has, in many locations, forced a de-radicalization of the language we use to talk about race. It seems worthwhile then to consider what the entry of ‘Asian Canadian’ into the academy can be. If it is imagined as oppositional, how can opposition be incorporated in the institution? If it is more unstable and multi-valenced than that, how exactly can we understand its shape? Fur162

ther, if the shape of the nation and its discourses has shifted in the years since that more overtly oppositional work, how are we to understand the placing of Asian Canadian discourses in institutional space (and time)? The Work of the Name It is at the level of cultural movement, not document production for its own sake, that subjects come in to being. A kind of education occurs. I would argue that these ephemeral things are at least as important and significant as the establishment of cv-able university or government programs. Of course, the ephemeral and the established need not exclude one another. Indeed, if anything they support and strengthen. But I think what lies at the root of this tension is a crisis of historicizing, and also of resource distribution. As Monika Kin Gagnon notes in the introduction to Other Conundrums, the raced name  in this case ‘Asian Canadian’  is problematic. In order to function as liberatory, it must be a reclamation. But the problem of reclamation is that it is always tied to the name of the master  whiteness  and as such, can never be freed from it as long as one claims identity with the racialized name. Rey Chow has also written about this and concludes that one can only live on the edge of the disappearance of the name, always looking towards the moment of its departure, but nonetheless, drawing power from its temporary, contingent presence.13 If this is the case, then real political power lies in the ephemeral passing event and not in the solidification of the name. If the power of the raced name lies in its contingency, then the question becomes how its relation to the institution might most productively take shape. Hardt and Negri also address this conundrum in slightly different terms. Writing in terms of national liberation movements, they argue that the nation state is the poisoned gift of national liberation movements: “The revolution is… offered up, hands and feet bound, to the new bourgeoisie… [R]evolutionaries get bogged down in ‘realism,’ and modernization ends up lost in the hierarchies of the world market.”14 I don’t want to go so far as to call Asian Canadian Studies as the poisoned gift of Asian Canadian liberation struggle. This is, in one sense, the old co-optation argument, which can tend to be oversimplistic, though not without its power. While many cultural activists over the last century have fought against the exclusions of the status quo, it is not clear that inclusion into the fold  of the academy or of the nation state  produces liberation from histo13

14

Rey Chow, Ethics After Idealism: Theory, Culture, Ethnicity (Reading Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 133.

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ries of injustice. Then again, nor is it clear that they don’t. As Chris Lee has noted, the critique of institutionalization may itself be a paralyzing gesture.15 It might be more important to ask how to inhabit the institution in ways that continue to fight oppression, and to generate liberatory change, art and ideas. I want to take some time here then, to think about what is produced when, after many years of banging on the door, the marginalized subject is finally let in. Spivak famously argued that when the subaltern gets to speak, she is subaltern no longer.16 What is she then? I don’t want to give up the power of the subaltern. I realize that to some extent, I have, but then I need to ask, how can I speak alongside? What is the nature of this new power I have acquired? How is ‘Asiancy’ possible within the institution and what might it look like? And how is ‘Asiancy’ different in this moment than it was a decade ago? It is important to think of history not as a continuum but as fragmented and sometimes circular. It is also important to ask the question of location, and to note the disjunctive connections from place to moment to place. If this sounds abstract, it isn’t. I’m thinking of the events marked by the recent Vancouverbased Anniversaries of Change project  the 1907 Riots, the 1947 repeal of the Head Tax, the 1967 Citizenship Act and the 1997 ‘return’ of Hong Kong to China. But I’m also thinking in particular of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of a major bulwark against the unmitigated flow of capital. I’m thinking of the rise of China as a major world economic force, and the various sub- and super-terranean machinations that have altered what it means to live in an apparently democratic state at the beginning of a new century. I am not a political scientist, a geographer or a historian, but what I do register is that way in which the Asian body signifies as it circulates is very different than it was a century ago. I don’t want to take the extreme position of suggesting that the Canadian state is a completely different entity than it was a decade ago, but I also want to insist that it is not the same. With the intensified circulation of Asian capital and the bodies associated with it, both as privileged business people (with a culture of their own) and as migrant labour, not to mention the movement of body parts, products and data that tends to move from the Third World to the First, it seems important to ask what the relationship of these bodies and their representations is to the racialized bodies attached to the history of the 1907 riots, to restaurant work, laundries, the railway, the corner store. The need to narrativize, commemorate, address and mourn remains a continuous necessity. But the work of 15

Christopher Lee, “The Lateness of Asian Canadian Studies,” Pacific Canada: Beyond the 49th Parallel. Special issue of Amerasia Journal 33.2 (2007): 1-18. 10. 16 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Sub-altern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). 271-316.

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narrativization, commemoration, address and mourning, I want to argue, changes depending on the moment and the geography into which it is deployed. Specifically, I worry that at the present moment the stories of past wrongs against Asian Canadians get redeployed as a sign of Canada’s benevolence, a sign of liberal/multicultural arrival, that then entices both overseas capital and overseas labouring bodies with the myth of Canadian multicultural utopia in which all violence has been resolved. Money and bodies arrive on the power of this myth, and are then subject to imprisonments, media attack, dangerous and violent repatriations, loneliness, familial fracture, use and misuse of investment moneys, and the subjection to a whole battery of new stereotypes attached to newly arrived bodies that are every bit as racist as the old stereotypes. All this precisely because Canada has not and perhaps can not escape the conditions of its own founding which were and remain conditions of racism, violence and exclusion. It is more necessary than ever to talk about the relationship between the horrors of the past and horrors of the present, so that the stories of the past don’t become whitewash for present injustice. It seems to me that this is the work that the term ‘Asian Canadian’ can and should do. That without foregrounding its liberatory political commitments there is a real danger of it solidifying into a ‘poisoned gift’  a commodified, conservative replica of its former active self. If the same stories can do opposite kinds of work depending on what cause they are deployed in the service of, then it is important to be aware of the cause at any given moment and to choose it deliberately. ‘Asian Canadian’ cannot be an end in itself. It seems to me that the most productive ‘asiancy’ of Asian Canadian lies in contingency, self-reflection, anti-oppression, a progressive politics of present, interdisciplinarity, commitment to grassroots community, specificity, and the local. Its power for me is the power of difference acting on both small and large scale in order to effect change for those whom and that which has been marginalized. It might be doing work against trade liberalization. It might mean doing environmental work, or work around water rights, as indeed the activist and thinker Dorothy Christianson called for at the recent Anniversaries of Change symposium in Vancouver.17 It might mean coalition building with racialized workers in other countries, who lie on the bottom rungs of the international feeding chain of capital. Its original liberatory power is thus paradoxically not necessarily located in the same issues that it has been historically. We needn’t be afraid of the exact repetition of history so much as resonant new circulations and abuses of hegemonic power  whether that is the power bestown through race, 17

Dorothy Christianson, “Women, Resistance and Cultural/Community Activism.” Paper presented at Anniversaries of Change Conference. SFU Harbour Centre, Vancouver. 7 Sept, 2007.

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capital, religion or the military. The work of the term and those who claim it, I think, remains in how to nudge it into ethical action. It is important to be aware that historical acts of self-defense such as that against the 1907 riots were important because they were struggles against injustice. ‘Asian Canadian’ is an important term to use in the discussion of that moment because it was the term through which marginalized people were being attacked. The shape of that struggle in our contemporary moment is different from what it was. Certainly anti-Asian violence persists in our society. But there is also a power  hard won  attached to the idea of ‘Asian Canadian.’ I see part of my own work as a writer and intellectual as helping to articulate the evolving shape and movement of ‘Asian Canadian,’ so that social action comes from a well-considered ethical location, rather than allowing for a reified deployment of the term in interests which may or may not be just or generative for marginalized people. My ‘Asian Canadian’ is mobile, critical and flexible enough to see when power is shifting and to deploy itself in the interest of a social ethic rather than in self-interest. It cannot, in other words, be merely about furthering the interests of Asians and Asian Canadians as determined, bounded and knowable subjects. The necessity to interrogate oneself and to fight against injustice, however imperfectly, remains tantamount.

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II. Travelling Concepts: Back and forth across the Atlantic

II.1 Comparing Canada and Europe

Multiculturalism and Integration: Lessons to Be Learnt from Cases of Canada and Europe Jiri S. Melich

In many Western countries, multicultural coexistence is a fact of life, regardless whether they have in place differentiated policies targeting their ethnic and cultural groups or not. There may be several reasons why a ‘multicultural’ country decides for or opts out of having ‘multiculturalism policies’ (MCPs), some of them historical, some linked to more immediate political and economic strategies. Important, of course, is a tradition of systematic recognition (nonrecognition) of diverse character of its population and visions of their emancipation. MCPs are often used as an instrument of integration of the national society. The latter goal is apparently contradictory, and, as we will see, practice of multiculturalism goes, in a sense, against genuine inter-cultural integration. Some might argue that promoters of multiculturalism pursue a rather simplistic goal of using MCPs as a vent for minorities’ frustration at best and for diverting mobilizing potential of minorities into self-contained interest and thus diluting their potential as important political players at worst. All this leads to several interrelated questions – how much (and how much of it) of a cultural diversity in a country can be optimally managed? How can MCPs contribute to peaceful integration of a national society? And ultimately, if societies accept cultural diversity – to which extent will they benefit from it? Similarly, to which extent one needs to define universal values and universal public space that would support a cohesive integrated society? Also then, which forms of MCPs are most conducive to different modes of integration for a good society? To address at least some of these questions, we will look at the lessons from MCPs in Canada and Europe and their theoretical and political underpinnings. The Case of Canada The Discourse The notion of ‘multiculturalism,’ which began circulating in Canada in the mid1960s, is commonly used in three meanings: as a government policy, as a politi169

cal ideology of cultural pluralism underpinning the respective policy, and in reference to the ‘social reality’ of an ethnically diverse society.1 Implicit in the idea of multiculturalism in the second sense is the assumption that members of different ethnic and racial groups should coexist in harmony with each other within a context of legal, social, and political equality and mutual respect. The stated objectives of multiculturalist policies have included improved racial tolerance and the public acknowledgment of a culturally diverse and ideally pluralistic society.2 When looking at the Canadian case, one has to be aware that, no matter how paradigmatic it may seem, it is an ‘exceptionalist’ one (Australia might fit the same category). Apart from the territorially separated nation and province of Quebec, there are several original (‘first’) nations in Canada, alongside with immigrant or ethnic groups with ancestries or origins in dozens of countries, speaking a variety of languages, and having diverse cultural values and practices. With such a diversity and pluralism  especially in cities throughout Canada  it is then not by chance that in Canada a systematic and fruitful discourse on diversity and multiculturalism has taken place. The works of Charles Taylor, Bill Kymlicka, and others are (mostly positively) acknowledged in the global academic community and offer a sophisticated discussion on both theoretical roots of multiculturalism in the liberal thought and the argument of practical benefits and limitations of the multicultural approach. Definitions and Conceptualization. The Federal Government of Canada, in its official publications, defines multiculturalism as an integral part of being Canadian and claims that it equals to “the recognition of the cultural and racial diversity of Canada and the equality of Canadians of all origins.” In practice, multiculturalism has been seen as a tool to facilitate the integration of new Canadians by improving their chances of settling down, fitting in and moving up. Useful conceptualization especially of a Canadian brand of multiculturalism was provided by Bill Kymlicka, Charles Taylor, Augie Fleras, and some others. Fleras, for example, defines multiculturalism as a set of principles, policies, and practices for accommodating diversity as a legitimate and integral component of society. 3 1

Cf. Evelyn Kallen, “Multiculturalism: Ideology, Policy and Reality,” Journal of Canadian Studies l7.1 (1982): 51-63. 51. 2 Cf. Lorna Roth, “The Right to Communicate and the Communication of Rights: Cultures of Globalization.” Paper 1998, http://commposite.uqam.ca/videaz/wg4/0015.html (accessed October 2006). 3 Cf. Augie Fleras, “Multiculturalism as Society-Building: Doing what is Necessary,” in Contemporary Political Issues, ed. Mark Charlton and Paul Baker, 2nd edition (Scarborough: Nelson Canada, 1994), 25-40. 26. See also Paul Gingrich and Christopher J. Fries, “A ‘Great’ Large Family: Understandings of Multiculturalism Among Newcomers to Canada.” Paper presented to the National

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Both Kymlicka and Taylor emphasize in their texts the critical role played by culture in constituting individual identity and defend the provision of groupspecific rights to protect the cultures of national minorities (such as Aboriginal peoples) by arguing that the original cultural community to which a person belongs is constitutive of individual identity. Kymlicka treats multiculturalism as cultural pluralism and provides a genealogy of how minorities in a liberal society have incorporated into societies at large, and how societies accommodate the cultural differences of minority groups and confront the demands of these groups for recognition of their identity. In his ‘Multicultural Citizenship’, Kymlicka presents a number of theoretical arguments for polyethnic group rights and how they connect to the ideas of liberalism, individual freedom, and societal culture. This approach is consistent with many of the sociological theories of difference and integration (for example, Durkheim’s organic solidarity) and attempts to give a balanced treatment to both sides of the liberal-communitarian divide, with examples and justifications taken from the Canadian case. In his ground-breaking paper “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition,” Charles Taylor starts from a philosophical proposition that our identity, as individuals or groups, is partly shaped  or misshaped  by the recognition or nonrecognition we receive from others. He assumes a communitarian point of view by claiming that it is essential to human identity that one's community be recognized both politically and socially, and he warns that certain forms of political liberalism endanger that recognition and promote homogeneity rather than recognizing plurality. Such plurality, however, is not something we simply accept at its face value. He argues in favor of a possibility of ‘transvaluation’ of values and concepts, which would happen through cross-cultural dialogue, and which would open the way for a reconciliation of the conflicting demands of pluralism. Such a dialogue and its purpose can be achieved through what he calls a ‘language of perspicuous contrast’ – which does not refer to our or ‘their’ way of understanding but to some universal human constants. He argues, in the tradition of Gadamer, that we should not assume that all cultural practices are open to us for evaluation of their true intrinsic meaning and values, and we must instead work towards a (Gadamerian) ‘fusion of horizons’ that grows out of recognizing the (qualitative) differences between cultures.4 I have mentioned here only a few points from the high-profile Canadian debate. To many outside commentators it

4

Symposium on Immigration and Integration: New Challenges, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, October 27, 1996. For an interesting discussion on Charles Taylor’s treatment of liberalism and multiculturalism, see also Brian Milstein, “On Charles Taylor’s ‘Politics of Recognition’,” Notes on Political Theory, (2003), http://magictheatre.panopticweb.com/aesthetics/writings/polth-taylor.html (accessed May 2004).

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seems that both Kymlicka and Taylor were constrained by the Canadian exceptionalism and their insights in part fail to explain some other cases, for instance, those of the United States and Europe.5 Multiculturalism in Canada Canada has been praised and scorned as the first immigrant country to become highly pluralistic in a multicultural sense  in developing a guiding philosophy as well as the instruments of practical response to its ethnically diverse population. The eminence of multicultural themes and the penetration of social and political life by inter-cultural issues and multicultural policies is unprecedented in today’s world. However, as it seems, the actual situation is much more complex and ambiguous, and not all developments, including effects of MCPs on Canadian society, have been as effective and positive in meeting their own goals as desired. Let us briefly mention some determining characteristics of the Canadian ethnosocial reality: 1. Recognition of Diversity. In Canada, there has been long recognition of importance of ethnic diversity. The country has for decades embraced the ‘two founding nations’ and numerous indigenous peoples. From the early 20th century on, the diverse origins of immigrants have been recognized and some of their specific needs addressed. Nevertheless, the population diversity had often allowed for inequitable treatment of some groups, and domination of British-originated elites characterized much of the political, economic, and social system of Canada, at least through the 1950s, with dramatic changes only in the last few decades. 2. The Quiet Revolution in Quebec. The growing urbanization and industrialization, accompanied by the decline of religion and the increased educational levels had led in Quebec to a more modern and liberal society on the one hand, and more assertive nationalism on the other. The very rapid change in the province’s culture and society required adequate response to accommodate this emancipating society which increasingly called for self-determination. 5

On this debate, see especially Thomas C. Heller, “Modernity, Membership, and Multiculturalism,” Stanford Humanities Review 5.2 (1997): http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/5-2/heller.html (accessed October 2006).

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3. Hardly a Melting Pot. Historians and sociologists have long argued that for various reasons, and in part in contrast with the United States, the ‘melting pot’ model did not seem to explain what has been happening in Canada. Although in many respects the integration-assimilation process may not be all that different here as elsewhere, the argument persists that Canada has become characterized by ethnic pluralism with a lower degree of accommodation to the prevailing dominant national culture, and with greater ethnic diversity and greater retention of original cultures than many other receiving countries. 4. Modernization. As many have noted, with increasing urbanization and higher levels of education, the change in culture occurs in the direction of increased tolerance to other cultures. Kymlicka, for instance, maintains that as “a culture becomes more liberal, the members are less and less likely to share the same substantive conception of the good life, and more and more likely to share basic values with people in other liberal cultures.”6 This view has recently been increasingly challenged but, nevertheless, still holds more than a grain of truth. 5. Policies. As an official policy multiculturalism was adopted in Canada in 1971, initially within the bilingual framework. The Canadian Multiculturalism Act was passed by Parliament and proclaimed in 1988 with the main principles stated as: • •

Multiculturalism as a central feature of Canadian citizenship; and Every Canadian has the freedom to choose to enjoy, enhance or share his or her heritage.

Over years, the Canadian government – first its Secretary of State and later the ministry of Canadian Heritage – developed a number of multicultural programs, such as heritage language programs, a system of support to multicultural councils, and other ethnic programs. More recently, increased attention has been paid by the ‘Multiculturalism Program of Canadian Heritage’ to issues related to civic participation, anti-discrimination, and social justice.7 From the mid-1960s when the ‘Royal Commission of Bilingualism and Biculturalism’ was formed, the philosophy of multiculturalism in Canada has become 6

In Reginald Bibby, Mosaic Madness: Pluralism Without a Cause (Toronto: Stoddart, 1990), 87. This claim is of course a controversial one since the link between urbanism and ethnic tolerance is much more complex. 7 See also “Multiculturalism,” notes for the course Sociology 304 (1999), University of Regina website, http://uregina.ca/~gingrich/f299.htm (accessed October 2006).

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firmly entrenched (though at first more in the form of bi-culturalism).8 In the 1970s, multiculturalism had begun to be seen as an alternative to biculturalism, rather than a merely complementary political objective. A clearly multicultural (as opposed to bicultural) policy was first adopted in 1971, and became law in 1988 in the Canadian Multiculturalism Act. Multiculturalism was supposed to promote more understanding of people from all cultures, across their different languages, religious beliefs, political and social views, or national origins, while encouraging everybody to keep their own values and beliefs, and to accept one another. The ultimate goal was respect for people’s distinct cultural identity, with the assumption, however, that common Canadian values are upheld. Linked to three other related pieces of legislation  the Official Languages Act, the Citizenship Act, and the Canadian Human Rights Act (1982)  as well as relevant international agreements,9 the Canadian Multiculturalism Act of 1988 has coverd two broad areas. From a political and legal perspective, the most important guarantees included the following: 1) the “full and equitable participation of individuals and communities of all origins in the continuing evolution and shaping of all aspects of Canadian society” and assistance to eliminate “any barrier to such participation;” 2) the assurance of “equal treatment and equal protection under the law, while respecting and valuing their diversity” and 3) “equal opportunity to obtain employment and advancement” in all federal institutions for “Canadians of all origins.”10 The Act’s cultural and anti-racial measures aim at recognizing and promoting “the understanding that multiculturalism reflects the cultural and racial diversity of Canadian society,” acknowledging the freedom of all members of Canadian society “to preserve, enhance and share their cultural heritage.”11 The Act endorses understanding that “multiculturalism is a fundamental characteristic of the Canadian heritage and identity” and that it “provides an invaluable resource in the shaping of Canada’s future and the existence and enhancement of the diversity of Canadian cultural and racial communities and their historic contribution to Canadian society.” It also emphasizes “the understanding and creativity 8

The Commission’s report addressed the rights of French-speaking people, in what was predominantly English-speaking, ethnically “English” Canada. According to the commission, the French language and culture should be valued and legally supported (as was adopted in the Official Languages Act, 1969), as well as all the diverse cultural heritages of Canadians. 9 Namely, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Specifically in the Canadian Human Rights Act, the proclaimed equalities applied as the rights and privileges were meant to ensure that any person participates as a member of the society, regardless of racial, ethnic, cultural, or religious background. 10 Multiculturalism Act, 1988, sections 3.l. a): through 3.1 i), and section 3.2.a). 11 Ibid.

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that arise from the interaction between individuals and communities of different origins.” Finally, it calls for “the preservation and enhancement of the use of languages other than English and French, while strengthening the status and use of the official languages of Canada.”12 Compared to the original MCPs of the 1970s, the 1988 Act not only recognized the demographic realities of Canada and symbolically promoted multiculturalism as a national state objective, but also encouraged institutional changes by providing tangible benefits in the form of equality-rights legislation. It had important implications for employment equity programs which called for structural and institutional assimilation of ethnocultural, aboriginal, and visible minorities across and within all federal agencies, Crown Corporations, and federally-contracted institutions and businesses.13 In 1995, the federal Department of Canadian Heritage launched a review of its programs, which resulted in a redesigned Multiculturalism Policy of 1997, with the three essential goals outlined in this new policy: identity, civic participation, and social justice, in the context of the overall goal of balanced ‘managed diversity.’14 This reconceptualization represented rather a cosmetic adjustment of the longstanding policies – in a process that by the time evidently contained the complex net of others (also evolving) considerations (immigration and refugee legibility, foreign policy, different provincial programs, etc.). Thus the real impact of this adjustment was rather incremental and perhaps visible in the longer run only. Are MCPs Working in Canada? The MCPs in place in Canada may have helped to improve the overall intercultural dialogue and acceptance of minorities, but there are indications that they have not improved integration of immigrants into the Canadian society. As some 12

Ibid. It also included “the appreciation of the diverse cultures of Canadian society and the reflection and the evolving expressions of those cultures.” See Lorna Roth, Lorna, “The Delicate Acts of ‘Colour Balancing’: Multiculturalism and Canadian Television Broadcasting Policies and Precatices, In Canadian Journal of Communication 23.4 (1998): http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php /journal/article/viewArticle/1061/967 (accessed May 2004). The federal government established a Multiculturalism Directorate within the Department of the Secretary of State in 1972. Changes in legislation were the Citizenship Act of 1977, the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977, the Immigration Act of 1978 and the Constitution Act of 1982. These acts generally argued for equality of all, equal rights and benefits of the law without discrimination on the basis of race, nationality, ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age, or mental or physical disability. 13 Multiculturalism Act, section 3.2. 14 The new goals of this policy were outlined in the Canadian Heritage document “The Multiculturalism Program: The Context for Renewal” (1995).

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evidence shows, they have also mostly failed to prevent racism and discrimination, especially against ‘visible minorities,’ though the levels of the latter attitudes are disputed.15 Many people from these groups continued to feel the effects of racism, prejudice, and cultural inequalities.16 What has emerged in the developments and arguments of the late 1990s and early 2000s was an underlying tension between certain cultural practices of recent immigrants and the mainstream values of Canadian liberal democracy, including sex equality.17 These tensions found expression in the several backlash incidents and occasional flare-ups of racial and/or religious hatred.18 Another disturbing fact was that some ethnic groups have lost ground gained in the past decades – for various reasons, not in the least because of the official multiculturalism. As Reginald Bibby, Kenneth McRoberts, Neil Bissoondath, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and others have noted, the official multiculturalism may both weaken the Canadian unity, promote ethnic segregation, and paralyse ethnical efforts for stronger efficacy in the mainstream political process.19 Bissoondath (novelist of Trinidadian descent) and Keith Spicer (the former Chairperson of the Canadian broadcasting regulatory agency) are the most recent heavy-weights who have joined critics in arguing that multiculturalism is likely to generate “hostilities and shift loyalties from large national 15

A typical argument was presented by Lorna Roth: “While recognizing the psychological impact of the state's efforts to provoke acceptance of multiculturalism, it is important to note the possibility that multiculturalism programs may degenerate into mere tokenism and ethnic folkloric activities. There are many examples of this, such as the increased public representation of ethnocultural and visible minorities in Canada Day and other national holiday celebrations or the way in which the Canadian government expresses its international distinctiveness by highlighting aboriginal and ethnocultural symbolism at exhibition sites such as World Fairs. [...] The visible and audible portrayal of ethnicity in public life does contribute to a sense of participation in society on the part of minority groups, but it does not improve their material conditions or their institutional/structural assimilation into the economy. One is tempted to be suspicious that the concern with symbolic distribution may [...] act as a substitute for policy on the distribution of material benefits.” Roth 1998, n5. 16 See, for example, Brian Thom, “Canadian Multiculturalism & Stólo Cultural Identity,” Humanities 10 (1996), http://web20.mindlink.net/stolo/multicul.htm (accessed May 2006). 17 The feminist and political theorist Susan Okin argued that a concern for the preservation of cultural diversity should not conceal the discriminatory nature of gender roles in many traditional cultures, that, at the very least, ‘culture’ should not be used as an excuse for suppressing the women’s rights movement. See Susan Moller Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?,” in Is Multiculturalism Bad For Women?, ed. Joshua Cohen and Matthew Howard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 7-26. 18 In the past couple of years, there were such incidents as windows smashed out of a private Muslim school in Montreal, two Orthodox Jewish schools firebombed etc. 19 See Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: Norton, 1992) and Neil Bissoondath, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (Scarborough: Nelson Canada, 1992).

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entities to small ethnic enclaves, making it more difficult to establish order within a stable Canadian federation.”20 This came at the time when a minority of Muslim immigrants have become increasingly alienated and emphasized their separation from, and even hostility to, the mainstream Canadian society.21 According to the above argument, MCPs may have helped to preserve cultures and languages of many ethnocultural groups, but this has not resulted in uniting Canadians or of bringing them together. Rather, it has contributed to keeping different groups apart and has been one of the factors responsible for the tendency to “cultural group solidarity at the expense of broader social participation.”22 Others have warned that with the emphasis on multiculturalism and bilingualism, Canadian identity as such has been under threat. In the strong wording by Gingrich: The policy may be symbolic in expressing good ideas, but in practice is very limited and has no substance. Resources devoted to multiculturalism may be largely devoted to symbolic aspects of culture, such as ethnic lifestyle, while ignoring the real problems of racism, discrimination, and inequality faced by people in minority cultures…. [Bibby] makes a somewhat different argument when he says that this emphasis on diversity means that there is limited group identity, no group vision, no national goals or dreams, nothing in the value system that marks it as Canadian.23

A similar argument was made by P.D. Hutcheon: [The] startling omission in the [multiculturalism legislation documents], is any clear expression of the importance of national unity, and of the need for minority subcultures to integrate into the larger society and to identify with an enveloping and 20

In Pat Duffy Hutcheon, “Multiculturalism in Canada,” paper presented at the World Congress of the International Sociological Association in Montreal in July 1998, http://humanists. net/pdhutcheon/Papers%20and%20Presentations/Multiculturalism%20in%20Canada.htm. (acessed August 2009). 21 On June 17, 2006, several Canadian Muslims were arrested on charges of plotting terrorist attacks on targets including the national Parliament. As N. Bissoondath notes, even in Canada, “Muslims are the first group to seriously challenge our notions of multiculturalism and tolerance,” in “Multiculturalism in Canada: One nation or many?,” The Economist Nov 16, 2006: http://www. economist.com/world/la/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8173164 (accessed August 2009). 22 Reginald Bibby quoted from Charlton and Baker, 26. Of all Canadian provinces, Quebec has been the least supportive of multiculturalism. There is no doubt that to many French Canadians, multiculturalism threatened to reduce them to just another ethnic group. Recently, however, the Quebec government has adopted a form of multiculturalism termed an “interculturalism policy.” In this sense, interculturalism is viewed as a less threatening policy than MCPs. 23 Gingrich and Fries, 1996; See also Reginald Bibby, Mosaic Madness: Pluralism Without a Cause (Toronto: Stoddart, 1990), 103.

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evolving Canadian culture. Furthermore, although there is a recurring emphasis on ‘cultural retention’ for all of the diverse communities within the whole, there is no corresponding emphasis on the need to build, protect and transmit a distinctively Canadian culture.24

In focusing on social justice as a major theme, the recent Multiculturalism Program (1997) has shifted emphasis from unconditional support of diversity to more socially functional ‘management’ of equitable integration. The phrases ‘management of diversity,’ ‘management of pluralism,’ or ‘managing a diverse workplace’ have become commonly used in Canada. They appeared to some as recognition of real problems that would be dealt with in a multicultural manner; to others, they were disguised phrases for expressing a lack of progress of MCPs.25 So far, the results have not been too encouraging, the levels of social integration and upward social mobility, racial discrimination and barriers, as well as racist attitudes, especially against “visible minorities” are still seen as far from being satisfactory.26 The promotion of good race relations through positive rhetoric is commendable, but it hardly eradicates cultural and racial discrimination merely because it makes ambitious reconceptualization of the problem. When the race relations issue was introduced as part of the MCPs in the 1980s, it was not recognized in principle as a separate concern. Governments of all levels have responded to race issues as they have arisen, but with little coordination or continuity.27 Unfortu-

24

Duffy 1998, 27. Cf. Fleras in Charlton and Baker 27. 26 Among the various ethnic groups in Canada, visible minorities have the lowest incomes and highest rates of poverty. Although the economic situation is somewhat better for those who have been in Canada longer and for the Canadian-born generation, the perception that they have been affected by discrimination is more widespread among the latter two groups. In fact, there is a racial divide over perceptions of discrimination. Cf. Jeffrey G.Reitz and Rupa Banerjee, “Racial Inequality, Social Cohesion and Policy Issues in Canada,” in Belonging? Diversity, Recognition and Shared Citizenship in Canada, ed. Keith Banting et al. (Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy, 2007), 489-546. One has to realize that the ideal and intent of multiculturalism may be confused with the practice and reality of multiculturalism. Whenever members of some minority groups complain that racism and discrimination exist in Canada and this would indicate that the policy has been a failure. 27 In the 1970s, instances of violence against racial minorities in Toronto resulted in a municipal task force report entitled “Now Is Not Too Late” (1977). In the 1980s, the federal government responded to racial issues with a report called Equality Now! Participation of Visible Minorities in Canadian Society, House of Commons, 1984. This prompted some policy development and formulations, e.g. the Employment Equity Act, 1986 which included provisions for visible minorities. In the course of 1990s, racial barriers have been identified across a range of institutions in Canada, and many policy areas now deal with the problem of race relations. These include immigration and settlement policy, human rights policy; employment policy (also addressing discrimination and 25

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nately, neither the two relevant Acts (the Act of 1988 and the complementary Human Rights Act prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of race in such areas as accommodation and employment) directly address the underlying attitudinal basis, i.e. the hidden racism, that might be both behind feelings of discrimination and structural inequalities.28 Rather to the contrary, many members of the affected groups believe they have experienced “discrimination based on their minority racial origins;” the research on the extent of discrimination  although it does not conclusively point to discrimination as a significant cause of racial inequality  has not “conclusively resolved the question.”29 For years, many critics had pointed out that policies designed to address the special needs of visible minorities and to promote racial equality had been developed without an emphasis on specifics and with perhaps an even smaller consensus on objectives. Even though the incidents of racism in Canada are not alarming in absolute terms, race relations have attracted calls for new anti-racism measures. In 2005, A Canada for All: Canada’s Action Plan against Racism has attempted to coordinate existing policies directed at racial equality rather than initiate new ones. But again, as some have argued, this one, like previous efforts, sets very broad goals but offers few specific measures and incentives.30 The anti-racism meas-

recognition of immigrant qualifications), policies for minority equality in public services, and policies for policing and the administration of justice in minority communities. 28 Audrey Kobayashi, “Multiculturalism: Representing a Canadian Institution,” in Place/Culture/ Representation, ed. Duncan, James and David Ley (London: Routledge Press, 1993), 205-231. 222. 29 Ibid. 30 “Policy related to racial minorities is spread throughout agencies and levels of government. One example of lack of coordination is the policies that address the deteriorating employment situation of newly arrived immigrants.” (Jeffrey G. Reitz, and Rupa Banerjee, “Racial Inequality, Social Cohesion and Policy Issues in Canada,” in Belonging? Diversity, Recognition and Shared Citizenship in Canada, eds. Keith Banting et. al. (Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy, 2007), 489-545. 523). According to Reitz, “[M]any policies involve activities for which responsibility is divided among various levels of government, and the responsible parties have taken approaches that are in some respects complementary and in others diverse — even contradictory. A recent example is the federal plan, announced by the Harper government, to create an agency to assess foreign-acquired credentials; it takes little account of existing provincial agencies. Instead, we need a comprehensive policy initiative that addresses such issues as immigrant employment, settlement programs, recognition of immigrant qualifications, bridge training and employment discrimination. And all of this should be considered in relation to the ongoing success of the immigration program. Coordination might be enhanced by the creation of a unit within the federal government (perhaps directed by a cabinet minister) responsible for immigration-related policies and with the authority to initiate discussions with provincial and municipal governments to promote greater consistency and effective policy-making. Illustrative of the lack of policy specificity (at all levels of government) regarding goals is the absence of provision for their formal evaluation.” (Reitz and Banerjee 2007, 524).

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ures were again discussed in the 2007 Roundtables on multiculturalism across the country.31 The findings of the 2007 Roundtables discussions revisited the theme of multiculturalism as a means to an inclusive and equitable society, and emphasized that this cannot be done without “transforming principles to practice.” They also pointed out that MCPs cannot “work out of sync with other domestic and foreign policies, such as those on employment, immigration, health, and international relations.”32 Despite all this criticism, Canada's variant and scope of MCPs appear to be relatively unharmed by the backlash against multiculturalism and support for immigrants and immigration remains at all-time highs in Canada.33 A significant majority of Canadians link immigration with some tangible positive social, economic and cultural advantages. How do we account for the relative acceptance of MCPs in Canada and European countries’ balking at what they saw as excessive (esp. Muslim) immigration and politically correct multiculturalism? Is there anything else about the Canadian way and Canada’s diversity model that transforms immigration and multiculturalism into low-risk options for living together with our differences? Or is Canada just plain lucky because of geographic location and historical destiny?34 One of the reasons for the difference between Canada and Europe might be that in the latter multiculturalism has tended to disengage immigrants from full and equal citizenship rights, while in the former access to citizenship has been part of the immigration and multicultural package. Immigrants to Europe were rarely seen as potential citizens, but rather as guest workers who would eventually return home upon completion of their work contracts. Arguably, Europe’s embrace of multiculturalism may have partly been predicated on the logic that guest workers and their families needed retention of their cultural and language

31

Jean Lock Kunz and Stuart Sykes, From Mosaic to Harmony: Multicultural Canada in the 21st Century Results of Regional Roundtables (Ottawa: Publication of Government of Canada, Policy Research Initiative, 2007). 32 Kunz and Sykes, 2007, 4. 33 In a survey by the Centre for Research and Information on Canada involving a representative sample of 2,032 randomly selected Canadians who were interviewed in August 2005 (with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.2 per cent 19 times out of 20), Canadians clearly value multiculturalism as a defining characteristic of Canada. See Augie Fleras, “Multiculturalism Works in Canada,” in The Record Kitchener, 28 October, 2005, http://www.culturescanada.ca/news.php?detail =n1138900884.news (accessed May 2006). 34 Ibid.

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skills for eventual readjustment ‘back home.’35 This logic was also frequently justified on the grounds that European countries did not see themselves as immigrant societies; therefore, they had no responsibility to actively integrate migrants into the social and political fabric. This did not produce systematic integration but rather the covert efforts at assimilation or segregation and resulted in an uneasy co-existence of separate groups with little or no inter-ethnic interaction. In contrast, in Canada, immigrants are seen as assets rather than burden, crucial to Canada building rather than a national liability, and as potential citizens rather than a permanent underclass. Although Canadian politicians often beg to differ on the optimal scope of immigration and MCPs, there is a widespread consensus on keeping and improving existing policies.36 A relatively positive image of immigrants in Canada can also be attributed to the different demographic and sociological profiles of migrants to Canada and Europe – in part determined by a migrant selection process increasingly based on ‘merit.’ The geographic factor cannot be discarded either and likely works as advantage for immigrants; i.e. potential immigrants from developing countries mostly need additional efforts and resources to reach Canada or return and might be in a better position to sustain themselves there. Not in the least, as already hinted, the Canadian immigration system applies the point-scheme (rewarding the most suitable and ready) through which it selects highly skilled and resourceful immigrants, which naturally facilitates their adjustment. This is linked to the practice of the so-called ‘integration from abroad’ (which has recently caught on also, for instance, in the Netherlands), of recruiting immigrants in their countries of origin. By making it difficult for the poor and unskilled from Africa or the Middle East to come to Canada, the advantage of distance allows Canada to select who they want and how to integrate. This, in effect, reinforces public perception of immigration and multiculturalism as relatively safe options for building Canada as a working multicultural society. Another reason why it seems that MCPs are relatively working in Canada might be not only selectivity but also a greater diversity of immigrants, which, to a degree, accounts for higher spatial dispersion and perhaps also competition of different ethnic groups.37 The majority of migrants to Europe, by contrast, are not selected at all (as they entered on the

35

As Kymlicka pointed out, both immigration and multiculturalism are more likely to enjoy public support when immigrants are seen as bona fide permanent residents with access to full and equal citizenship rights. 36 Typically, in his 2006 throne speech, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty emphasized the province’s rich multicultural heritage as a means for attracting highly skilled immigrants and thus has explicitly linked the province’s cultural diversity with its economic prosperity. 37 Cf. Augie Fleras, “Multiculturalism Works in Canada,” Waterloo Record (12 May 2006), A9.

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basis of rights, either family or refugee rights, or illegally).38 How the Canadian system will work in the future, remains to be seen. According to the 2007 Roundtables, “a number of knowledge gaps” were revealed and many areas “need to be explored further.” It appears, for instance, “that religion is a dimension that current conceptions of multiculturalism are ill-prepared to handle.” Other questions that require more attention are whether ethnic enclaves or ethnically concentrated neighbourhoods (esp. in the largest cities of Toronto and Montreal, but not necessarily “ghettos”) ”facilitate or impede the integration of newcomers and ethnic minorities,” or how to deal with the “the challenges that second-generation Canadians face” (mixed cultural identities, social integration, sense of belonging), in order to develop policies that respond to and reflect their needs.39 Multiculturalism in Europe: How Different? The experience of Europe, as a result of the historical and demographic constellation, has been somehow distinct. As Joppke has noted, the difference is especially in that the migrant’s initial experience in the new European society is precarious, and (s)he gradually has to ‘earn’ the rights of full membership. In this, Europe has remained different from the classic immigration nations, in which from the first day the legal immigrant is considered a fully functioning and rightful member of the new society.40

The notion of ‘multiculturalism’ gained momentum in European countries later than in Canada, with multiculturalism as a political concept being adopted only in the 1980s, mostly with direct reference to Canadian and Australian experiences and official policies. Compared to the two latter countries, however, the term was at first used rather as a description for changed socio-cultural realities than as a comprehensive political strategy or ideal model for societal arrangements. Undoubtedly, there have been significant differences in the practical application of multicultural political principles in individual West-European countries. In some of them, multicultural policies have meant more than recogni38

Because a majority of these migrants are unskilled and (perhaps with the exception of those entering France) not proficient in the language of the receiving society, and since they often become immediately dependent on welfare, they face serious adjustment problems. 39 Kunz and Sykes 2007, 13. 40 Christian Joppke, “Immigrants and Civic Integration in Western Europe,” in Belonging? Diversity, Recognition, ed. Keith Banting, Thomas J. Courchene and F. Leslie Seidle (Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy, 2007), 321-350.

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tion of diversity and immigrant groups’ distinctiveness – their ethnic, cultural and religious identity – and over time have become accepted as such and addressed in accommodative and integration programs. In other countries, despite speaking of multiculturalism, assimilative elements prevailed, though even here becoming more differentiated. 41 By and large, the different historical-national trajectories in typical immigrant countries (Canada, U.S., and Australia) and in Europe account for differences in adoption of multiculturalism and its modes. As Thomas C. Heller noted, Multiculturalism is different and easier in America because [….] European liberalism has embedded the richer dimensions of citizenship at the national level and defined modernity in nationalist discourse. The European Union faces an impasse in political, social, and cultural deepening because the European popular consciousness historically associates these features with the defining attributes of national identity. European citizenship is empty and resisted because the unity of European modernity is the differentiation of thick national communities.42

Although immigration and MCPs widely differ in Western European countries, the developments over the past fifteen years (especially in Germany, which felt under pressure to abandon its anti-integrationist model), have been in the direction of increased explicit emphasis on the goal of integration of immigrants, under the auspices of the EU and its efforts of harmonizing policies in this area. ‘Europeanization’ has provided “the most immediate cognitive impetus and organizational cues for this diffusion,” leading to significant policy convergence.43 At the same time, as the trend and process of policy borrowings show, the diffusion has also worked between individual member states – as, for example, the civic integration policy, which was pioneered in the Netherlands in the late 1990s and has since been adopted across northern and western Europe, most notably in France and Germany.44 The efforts of the EU may have helped in setting up some standards, but they did not provide specific working recipes. Similarly, as in Canada, ‘inclusiveness’ became the popular buzzword used in Brussels’ guidelines – and it is 41

See Martin Baumann, “Multiculturalism and the Ambiguity of Recognizing Religion,” DISKUS 5 (1999), http://www.uni-marburg.de/fb11/religionswissenschaft/journal/diskus (accessed December 2006). 42 Cf. Thomas Heller, “Modernity, Membership, and Multiculturalism, Stanford Humanities Review 5.2 (1997): http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/5-2/heller.html (accessed October 2006). 43 Joppke 2007, 325. 44 According to Joppke, the novelty of the civic integration policy lies in its obligatory character, which has increased over time, and “this notional integration policy has even been transmuted into a tool of migration control, helping states to restrict especially the entry of unskilled and nonadapted family migrants.” Joppke 2007, 328.

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“usually formulated in the metaphor of two-way integration.”45 It suggests that not just migrants but also the receiving societies have to make adjustments, the latter being mandated to create “the opportunities for the immigrants’ full economic, social, cultural, and political participation.”46 As it has turned out, this was much easier said than done, especially if ready-made recipes were hard to come by and political determination was weakened by sociopolitical cleavages. Neither helpful have been often vague EU recommendations, such as “[integration] implies respect for the basic values of the European Union.”47 Undoubtedly, these values have long been common to all liberal democracies (i.e. the principles of liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law). They are rather political than cultural or ethical values, not equipped to guide action in this complex sensitive area. Some EU countries, especially Spain (under a socialist government) wanted to commit the EU members to a substantial multicultural stance in this respect, obliging them to act proactively and protect migrant languages and cultures, but so far without much success in the climate increasingly hostile to progressive and empowering multiculturalism.48 Some of the EU countries, notably the Netherlands and Sweden, introduced certain elements of progressive MCPs, only to get the latter under the pressure of changing circumstances in the late 1990s. The case in point is the Netherlands, which, in the early 1980s, started to pursue Europe’s most elaborated and proudly displayed MPCs, with the objective to emancipate targeted ethnic minorities – including the groups’ own (but state-supported) ethnic infrastructures, i.e. ethnic schools, ethnic hospitals and ethnic media. But things began to sour soon. As a parliamentary inquiry into government policy toward ethnic minorities between 1970 and 2000 concluded, if some migrants in the Netherlands succeeded, then they did so in spite of, rather than thanks to, government policy (the Parliamentary Report of 2004). In ‘assimilationist’ France, a similar review of the French postwar immigration experience conducted by the Cour des

45

Joppke 2007, 326. Accordingly, the first of the EU’s common basic principles of immigrant integration policy reads: “Integration is a dynamic, two-way process of mutual accommodation by all immigrants and residents of the Member States… The integration process involves adaptation by immigrants, both men and women, who all have rights and responsibilities in relation to their new country of residence.” (Council of the European Union, 2004. “Immigrant Integration Policy in the European Union,” 14615/04 (presse 321), Brussels, November 19, 20). 46 Council of the European Union 2004, 19. 47 Ibid. 19. 48 Cf. Joppke 2007, 326-7.

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Comptes noted that integration policy remained “badly defined in its objectives and principles,” “incoherent,” “contradictory” and “insufficient.”49 According to Joppke, the Dutch integration failure, which came as a disillusionment to many (especially since the German ‘non-integration’ model seemed to work better) raised the question of whether the interethnic problems and the relations between ethnic minorities and the polity (and state structures) “are causally related to the multicultural ethnic minorities policy.”50 Conclusive evidence for either the absence or the existence of a causal link to explain effects of different types of MCPs on societal integration has yet to be presented. Not surprisingly, and again similarly as in Canada, some have argued that MCPs are bound to work against goals of integration. For instance, Koopmans lists a number of “mechanisms” that link multiculturalism policy with “unintended negative outcomes in the socioeconomic domain.”51 The negative consequences are mostly seen (as in the Canadian debate) as following from multiculturalism’s tendency to keep ethnic groups apart and to prevent their participation in mainstream society.52 Further significant criticism in the European context has been mounted by Paul Cliteur, Gunnar Njalsson, Paul Scheffer, and others.53 Thus, after an initial enchantment with multiculturalism in many European countries, there came sobering and disillusionment of the late 1990s - and then shock reaction in the wake of terrorist attacks of the 2000s. Even in countries long believed to espouse articulate and coherent national models of immigrant integration, the sense of failure and helplessness was strong. In most European countries the response of the political elites was to resort to scaling back official MCPs to more conditional modes of civic integration, which puts an extra burden on immigrants to prove themselves to be worthy of citizenship rights. Joppke characterized the shift in the Dutch case and the new measures:

49

Cour des Comptes, “L’Accueil des immigrants et l’intégration des populations issues de l’immigration,” Rapport au Président de la République suivi des réponses des administrations et des organismes intéressés. (Paris: Cour des Comptes, 2004), 9-10, http://www.ccomptes.fr/Courdes-Comptes/publications/rapports/immigration/immigration.pdf (accessed April 2006). See also Joppke 2007, 1-2. 50 Joppke 2007, 333. 51 Ruud Koopmans, “Tradeoffs between Equality and Difference: The Failure of Dutch Multiculturalism in Cross-National Perspective.” Paper presented at Immigrant Political Incorporation, April 22-23, 2005, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, 2. 52 Ibid. 53 See e.g. Paul Cliteur, De filosofie von mensenrechten [The Philosophy of Human Rights] (Nijmegen: Ars Aequi, 1999) or Paul Scheffer’s essay “Het multiculturele Drama” [The multicultural drama] in NRC Handelsblad (29 January 2000).

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[The] goal was migrant participation in mainstream institutions (later labelled ‘shared citizenship’) and autonomy, which was to be achieved through Dutchlanguage acquisition and labour-market integration …It has thus become quite literally true that… everyone is responsible for his own integration [….] As a counterpoint to this privatization of integration, coercive state involvement has massively increased. According to the new integration law, which went into effect in March 2006, not just newcomers but also settled immigrants (so-called oudkomers), not a few of them Dutch citizens, are required to pass an integration test, which presents the state with an enormous logistical task  identifying, mobilizing and policing the entire migrant population of the country.54

The Dutch turnabout and imposition of the goals of civic integration policy (CIP) has then been accepted as a ‘model’ and emulated elsewhere, albeit with national modifications. In Sweden and Finland, civic integration presents itself as more a right than an obligation (except for unemployed immigrants and those on social assistance); also there is no requirement of residence permits to enroll in integration programs. In Denmark and Austria, civic integration tends to be obligatory and its link to residence permits has been crucial.55 Interestingly, ‘semiintegrationist’ Germany has adopted the softest, most ‘Canadian’ variant of civic integration. The French version took initially a middle position between the above cases, moving from voluntary participation in CIPs toward the obligatory one (but stopping well short of the Dutch ‘radicalism’).56 According to Joppke, “the Dutch model of civic integration not only has spread horizontally to other European states but it has also had a vertical effect on the emergent European Union law on immigrant integration.”57 Overall, the withering of national models of immigrant integration and their creeping harmonization in western Europe is “unsurprising, because if anywhere, this is the part of the world in which neatly bounded nation-states no longer exist.”58 But such convergence in immigrant integration in Western Europe is not exhausted 54

Joppke 2007, 335. See Sandrine Musso-Van der Velde, “Immigrant Integration Policy: The Case of the Netherlands.” Unpublished Paper 2005. As Joppke notes, “[so far] the prevailing view has been that a secure legal status enhances integration; now, the lack of integration is taken as grounds for refusal of admission and residence, and the entire integration domain is potentially subordinated to the exigencies of migration control […] The most drastic expression of this is integration from abroad. According to the new integration law of 2006, applicants for family reunification must take an integration test at a Dutch embassy abroad as a precondition for being granted a temporary residence permit. Integration from abroad is not a Dutch invention […]” (Joppke 2007, 336). 55 See esp. Ines Michalowski, An Overview on Introduction Programmes for Immigrants in Seven European Member States (Amsterdam: Adviescommissie voor Vreemdelingenzaken, 2004). Here quoted from Joppke 2007, 16-17. 56 Cf. Joppke 2007. 57 Ibid. 342. 58 Ibid. 347.

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by the trend toward CIPs; it has been, almost as a rule, complemented by the rise of anti-discrimination measures – again in part in response to EU law.59 When searching for reasons of persisting different trajectories of immigration and MCPs in Canada and Western Europe, one should realize that the Canadian situation and policies are hardly applicable to Western Europe, as Canada has been for generations an immigration country by definition and the concept of the nation-state has evolved there in a different way, with fewer impediments on setting criteria for citizenship rights on the level making them both reasonably attainable by newcomers and facilitating acceptance of minority immigrants by the rest of society. Also, quite an important role here, among some other factors, should be attributed to the workings of the geographic factor and the different demographic and sociological profiles of migrants to Canada and Europe. Saying this, one should also acknowledge that Canada and Europe share many similar challenges and might also share some responses to them. In this globalizing era, all multicultural societies face the challenge of respecting cultural differences while recognizing the importance of fostering shared citizenship, “conferring rights while demanding responsibilities, and encouraging integration rather than assimilation.”60 Conclusion: MCPs or a Phased-In Three-Pronged CIPs Are a Solution? As it has been rightly noted, “[the] difficulties with contemporary theories of multiculturalism arise from the conflation of these two quite distinct concerns relating to non-discrimination and preservation of cultures.”61 In this sense, one may suggest we deal with two kinds of multiculturalism, negative and positive, the former awarding (restoring) equality rights to minority cultures and the latter positively supporting particular cultures (though in the case of non-discrimination policies both negative and positive measures might be involved). How are they linked to the goals of societal integration? The claim by the multiculturalist camp that rights for specific kinds of minorities “will create a more integrated society”62 may clash with the opinion of 59

Joppke has identified two other convergent trends: one toward more inclusive citizenship laws “by means of facilitating naturalization and introducing conditional jus soli citizenship for the descendants of immigrants;” and “the reinforcement of state neutrality in questions of cultural difference, and a parallel retreat from multicultural recognition.” Joppke 2007, 343. 60 See Kunz and Sykes 2007, 20. 61 Gurpreet Mahajan, “Rethinking multiculturalism.” Paper presented at Multiculturalism, a symposium on democracy in culturally diverse societies, New Delhi, December, 1999, http://www.indiaseminar.com/1999/484/484%20mahajan.htm (accessed November 2006). 62 Ibid.

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those who are sceptical of any going beyond recognition and individual rights. While for the first camp, minority special rights are seen as a necessary way of incorporating people into the polity, the latter camp sees things differently. According to the argument of the ‘positive’ group, as minorities receive institutional representation and their cultures survive and flourish, they will develop a sense of belonging and commitment to the state. This would reduce ethnic conflicts and make secession an unattractive option. Group rights would, in this way, be an inducement for minorities to remain within, and develop loyalty towards, the state of which they are at present a part.63

The liberal ‘negativists’ warn that there are many problems inherent in multiculturalism, especially those related to the danger that multiculturalism may help to “maintain backward cultures, hinder participation, prevent equal education and opportunity, and maintain exploitation and inequality.”64 In their opinion, heeding these warnings calls for specific MCPs being devised and applied in a way that they fit the idiosyncrasies of a particular time, space, and society, but at the same time promote European (or universal in their view) individual liberal values in the first place. Not in the least, this approach calls for distinguishing individual MCPs on their own merit. As Gurpreet Mahajan argues, [In a democracy] the concern for inter-group equality must be in tandem with the demand for intra-group equality. Consequently, multiculturalists need to ensure that measures introduced for the purpose of enhancing equality between groups do not become a means of sustaining structures of inequality within the community. This may be possible only when multiculturalism dissociates special rights granted for countering systemic discrimination of minorities within the nation state from rights that may be necessary for preserving minority cultures. Preservation of cultural practices can be, and often is, an excuse to continue with customs that perpetuate dis-

63 64

Ibid. Fleras 1994, 26 and 30. She presents an argument that “[by] limiting the emphasis on overcoming barriers, and by refusing to deal with the inherent structural inequalities in a capitalist economy, the policy ends up being irrelevant or regressive. Further, the legitimate claims of minority ethnic groups may be ignored or sidetracked by those who claim that there is equality and harmony.” Ibid. 26. In a rather different argument, Lamborn Wilson proposes that multiculturalism should proceed from individuals and groups, not from the top down. He calls this cross-culturalism but argues that ‘multiculturalism’ must be destroyed. Instead of government sponsored multiculturalism, Wilson calls for local action and “a non-hierarchic, de-centred web of cultures, each one singular, but not alienated from other cultures,” see Peter Lamborn Wilson, “Against Multiculturalism: Let flowers bloom,” http://www.t0.or.at/hakimbey/multicul.htm (accessed November 2006). See also Gingrich and Fries 1996.

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crimination of some groups within the community; special rights cannot be justified for this end.65

This debate has been accompanied by a strong ‘populist’ demand that another distinct set of policies, often going under the civic integration, which is being seen as a yardstick of optimal citizenship, replaces or complements traditional MCPs. But the recent switch to CIPs has its controversial side; there might lurk danger, some warn, that CIPs, especially when applied as forced programs might constitute “like eugenics and workfare policies,” an illiberal social policy, albeit in a liberal state. The paradox of civic integration is that it involves pursuing liberal purposes (shared citizenship, autonomy) through not quite liberal means. This is only part of a larger paradox of liberalism: “the realization of liberal values always depends upon states, which are by nature exclusive and illiberal institutions with borders and (generally) ascribed rather than freely chosen membership.”66 But both the Canadian and European evidence has indicated that the seemingly irreconcilable approaches of civic integration and multiculturalism could optimally balance and support each other, providing that best practices from each are correctly assessed and applied. The link between theory and practice, and the related problem of evaluation, are crucial here too. As Jeffrey Reitz, for instance, has complained, “multiculturalism policy itself has never been evaluated in the specific social sciences sense of the word, which implies direct observation of program impact.”67 Welldesigned evaluation may occasionally lead to some surprises, as when presenting the results of their research in the 1990s, Reitz and Breton concluded that in fact, Canadian MCPs (when compared to the situation in the U.S.) make little difference and a perception of multiculturalism is “largely symbolic and incapable of creating a major social impact.”68 The forms of CIPs might be multiple and varying but should generally focus on education and socio-economic integration (especially employment). In the Council of the EU 2004 resolution, “employment is a key part of the integration

65

Mahajan 1999. Joppke 2007, 21-22. However, King argued that such policies “are not born of sources extrinsic to liberalism, such as nationalism or racism, but are inherent in liberalism itself,” in Joppke 2007, 22. 67 Reitz and Banerjee 34-37. 68 Ibid. Their research has shown that intergroup relations involving immigrants (including racial minority ones) in Canada are not markedly different from those in the US, a finding that casts doubt on the notion that Canada’s multiculturalism has a dramatic impact. Another finding of the study was that whatever the impact of policies such as multiculturalism on paving the way for the social integration of immigrants, they may have worked less well for racial minority groups than for white immigrant groups. Ibid. 66

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process.”69 In response to the alarming degree of unemployment and welfare dependency among immigrants and their children in Europe (which contrasts with that of the United States or Canada, where migrant ethnics are generally employed), socio-economic integration should become the key focus of European states’ immigrant integration policies.70 There is little doubt that calibrated CIPs should be part and parcel of immigration and cultural policies which would include strong anti-discrimination laws and policies, which would secure equality of treatment, irrespective of one’s ethnic origin, and access for immigrants to institutions, as well as to public and private goods and services, “on a basis equal to national citizens and in a nondiscriminatory way.”71 However, the goals and practices of civic integration should not evoke measures constraining the freedom of religion, language, and culture (providing that this does not contravene the law). In fact, contrary to widespread assumptions, some studies have shown that ethnic religious participation does not seem to hinder social integration but on the contrary often contributes to a group adapting more quickly to the new context.72 The conflicting logic of CIPs on the one hand and anti-discriminatory policies on the other hand is well captured by Joppke: [B]oth civic integration and antidiscrimination adhere to opposite logics. The logic of civic integration is to treat migrants as individuals, who are depicted as responsible for their own integration; civic integration applies to the migration domain the austere neoliberalism that frames economic globalization. The opposite logic of antidiscrimination is to depict migrants and their offspring as members of groups, who are victimized by majority society, thus reintroducing at the tail end of integration the ameliorative group logic that had been thrown out at its beginning by the harsh individualism of civic integration. The peculiar coexistence of civic integration and anti-discrimination reveals that, in reality, two-way integration consists of two separate one-way processes: at first, the burden of change is all on the migrant; later, the burden of change is all on society.73

69

Council of the European Union, Immigrant Integration Policy in the European Union, 14615/04 (presse 321), Brussels, November 19, 2004, 20. 70 Ibid. 71 Council of the European Union 2004, 21. Cf. also Joppke, 2007. 72 For example, Bankston and Zhou in their study on Vietnamese youth in the US maintained that “the view of religion as enabling social adjustment to the host country through providing a solid base of ethnic identification is also generalizable to other immigrant and ethnic groups” (Carl L. Bankston and Min Zhou, “The Ethnic Church, Ethnic Identification, and the Social Adjustment of Vietnamese Adolescents,” Review of Religious Research 38.1 (1996): 18-37). 73 Joppke 2007, 329.

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As Katharyne Mitchell suggested, the ideal of good citizenship as inculcated by public education was no longer centred on the national, if “multicultural” individual but on the “strategic cosmopolitan” individual who could function in any national setting.74 Whether cosmopolitan or ‘universal,’ the heart of the task is in creating a widened viable public (civic) space in which universal fundamental values are agreed upon both in the context of the law and a social and political contract negotiated in the continuous dialogue by multiple actors representing both sides of the divide.75 Better integration into a host society should be a result of prudent and many-pronged ‘tailor-made’ policies, respecting all the basic human rights. Inevitably, integration should be seen “as a moral and social psychological issue,” for which any solution can only be complex and requiring long-term attention.76 If the problem is understood from this perspective and policies are designed and implemented reasonably and with care, only then can integration work for both the receiving and the received. The issues and demands of recognition and identity, tolerance and adjustment originate from fundamental characteristics of human beings. Both sides of the divide are as mirrors reflecting each other; both should show adequate restraint, flexibility, and prudence to be able to share creatively and peacefully their common space.

74

Katharyne Mitchell, “Educating the National Citizen in Neoliberal Times: From the Multicultural Self to the Strategic Cosmopolitan,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers n.s., 28 (2003), 387-403. Joppke fittingly elaborates on the topic: “The perceived need to master global competition is indeed one reason why old group narratives of multiculturalism  perhaps nationalism’s historical rearguard [....] are giving way to a new focus on the individual and his autonomy and self-sufficiency. Symptomatic, in this respect, is the centrality of employment in Europe’s contemporary immigrant integration policies.” Joppke 2007, 344. 75 Such a widened public sphere and legal framework would of course include the private sphere, whenever the law is violated in it. 76 John Rex, “Multiculturalism in Europe and America,” Nations and Nationalism 1.2 (1995): 243259.

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Multinational Pluralism – Rethinking Multiculturalism as an Approach to Diversity and Cultural Difference Robert Sata

While in the past political scientists assumed that liberalism and nationalism are two incompatible concepts, civil liberal and ethnic communitarian traditions are not as opposed as they may seem, and in fact, the two are often inseparable in modern nation-building and citizenship issues. Classical liberalism argues against identity as its main preoccupation is the limits of government and the right of the citizens against the government, and equality under the rule of law. Opposed to this, the first attempts of reconciling identity and citizenship culminate in what constitutes the theory of liberal nationalism, which supports the neutrality of the state, removing identity from the public realm. I will show that the theory of liberal nationalism gives a much more convincing account of the development of political communities and solidarity than political liberalism does but it is not free of criticism. I argue we need to move beyond liberal nationalism since equal citizenship and intercommunity solidarity is attainable only if identities are recognized on both the private and public. In ethnically divided societies, equal citizenship can only be assured with minority rights, which define the program of multiculturalism. While many contest this alliance of multiculturalism and liberalism, I argue that a liberal justification of this theoretical framework is possible. I also claim that pluralism also shifted from ‘old’ to ‘new’ pluralism that is characterized by deep divisions, a number of overlapping dimensions: cultural, social, epistemic; and cultural diversity as salient. As such, I conclude that multinational pluralism – understood as a theory integrating multicultural liberalism and egalitarian liberalism – is, unlike previous attempts, both conceptually and institutionally capable of providing an adequate framework for managing the contentious politics of ethnic diversity. Despite the initial jubilation, the end of the Cold War did not bring “the end of history”1 to the world since liberalism proved unable to contain or defuse ethnic conflicts and it was not liberal democracy but ethno-nationalism that be-

1

Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” The National Interest 16 (1989): 3-18.

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came the driving force of the new world order.2 Many considered the resurgence of nationalism inevitable due to the multifaceted challenges that the new geopolitical environment of the post-Cold War world, rapid technological innovation, or widening globalization presented for our traditional identities and our ways of looking at the world. The issue of nationalism is especially important because of the presence of national minorities within unitarily defined nation-states, which is a fact that potentially leads to bitter conflicts among the competing ethnic groups. The prospects of such ethnic identity-based conflict have increased significantly in recent decades, as is painfully visible from the bloodshed in the Balkans, the ongoing conflicts in Central Asia, the genocides of Rwanda, or the killings in East Timor. As Plamenatz argued, “in principle, national identity should be able to exist and persist without nationalism [but] in reality, when national identity feels threatened nationalism revives.”3 Similarly, Walter Kemp argues that national identity  a characteristic and a defining principle – becomes nationalism – the political program – when the nation comes under threat, be that real or perceived.4 The principle of self-determination of peoples is “more a factor of fragmentation and turbulence than a lever of human liberation”5 for the contemporary world and since history has proven that national minorities will not disappear in the foreseeable future, I argue that there is an urgent need to develop a better understanding of ethnic identity-based politics in order to be able to successfully manage ethnic identity-based conflicts. In this paper, I shall review different attempts to reconcile nationalism with liberalism. I argue that civil liberal and ethnic communitarian traditions are not as opposed as they may seem, and in fact, the two are often inseparable in modern nation-building and citizenship issues. In the relevant literature we find a great variety of understanding of what nationalism stands for, and we have no choice but to note the general confusion over what nationalism is. Modernists like Gellner or Anderson define nationalism as a sociological necessity, while ethnicists such as Hutchinson give a definition of nationalism based on ethnic groups, whose characteristics are inherited, while yet others, like Anthony Smith, do not essentialize just stress the importance of ethnicity. There is little agree2

3

4

5

Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman, “Citizenship in Culturally Diverse Societies: Issues, Contexts, Concepts,” in Citizenship in Diverse Societies, ed. Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1-44. 3. Stanley Hoffman, World Disorders: Troubled Peace in the Post-Cold War Era (Oxford: Rowan & Littlefield, 1998), 221. Walter Kemp, “Applying the Nationality Principle: Handle with Care,” Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe 4 (2002), http://www.ecmi.de/jemie/download/Focus4-2002_Kemp_ Kymlicka.pdf 1, 3. Hoffman 1998, 223.

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ment among the scholars, as nationalism can be irrational as well as a form of rational attachment; it can be progressive and regressive; as well as constructive or destructive. What seems to be agreed upon is that nationalism is seen as the connecting force between nations and states, by claiming that all members of a nation should live in the same state, which is exclusively their own only. The nation-state is at the core of modern Europe, the main vehicle for social mobility and redefinition. Some even extend the relevance of the nationalist delimitation to the international arena, to the relationships among the states, claiming nationalism is the principle of organization of the society of states.6 Following this logic, nationalism is an all-inclusive worldview that defines both the internal structure and external relations of the state. We can only conclude that nationalism is not easily definable and is often used as an umbrella term, covering a variety of different elements such as national consciousness, the expression of national identity, or loyalty to the nation. Its main thesis assumes a congruence of the political unit and high culture with a certain homogeneity necessary for a cohesive nation state. The power of the nationalist ideology lies in the claim that subjects can consider the state their own because pre-political ties of solidarity bind them to each other. Consequently, the state is nothing but an expression of such pre-political solidarity. In addition, this proposition considers national culture as a form of high culture that provides the foundation of the community. Putting it in other words: we define ourselves in cultural terms, and culture usually refers to our ethnicity or nationality.7 Accordingly, the ideology of nationalism can be summed up as: the world is divided into nations, nations are the source of all political and social power, individuals must identify with the nation to be free, and nations must be free and secure for peace of the world. Nevertheless the original idioms of nationalism as the different theories of nationalism describe them do not seem to provide a convincing account of the great variety of phenomena associated with nationalism, and the conceptual common ground is lacking for an easy combination of what are seen as the central idioms of nationalism. If one is to make sense of nationalism as a political idiom, then one has to account for these difficulties. My understanding of nationalism is somewhere between two understandings: nationalism as a discourse and nationalism as an ideology since, for the purposes of this paper I refer to nationalism as a doctrine, which states that nations are both the source and the ultimate holder of all political authority and social power in a state. I claim that nationalism as a political ideology

6 7

Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1961), 9. János Kis, “Beyond the Nation State - Hungary - Nationalism Reexamined,” Social Research 63.1 (1996): 4-6.; Kemp 2002, 2.

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is centered on a specific cultural doctrine, which strongly emphasizes values of national autonomy, unity, and identity. Although there is no consensus among political thinkers and philosophers on what exactly liberalism is, all theories properly considered ‘liberal’ share a number of fundamental concepts: freedom, toleration, individual rights, constitutional democracy that establishes the limits of government, the right of the citizens against the government, and equality under the rule of law. All liberal theories share a commitment to the idea that the state’s role must be defined such that it protects freedom and equality of all its citizens.8 While in the past political scientists assumed that liberalism and nationalism are two incompatible concepts, today this assumption is challenged by many. I claim the two are often inseparable in modern nation building. Some scholars tried to construct typologies of liberalism and nationalism in order to examine which forms of these are most compatible with each other, but instead of focusing on general classifications of liberalism, I claim we should base our attempt to reconcile liberalism with nationalism on the idea of equal human worth that is central to almost all major ethical traditions. It is a necessary condition for morality for a large variety of philosophers: Kant, Dworkin, Rawls, and Nozick – just to name a few.9 The same idea of equal human worth is also at the basis of the human rights discourse that is becoming more-and-more influential in today’s global world, thus further warranting the need for a new approach of understanding the relationship between nationalism and liberalism. Nevertheless, one important distinction between classical and contemporary understandings of liberalism has to be drawn because scholars often wrongly assume a benign role for classical liberalism in dealing with ethnic minorities, which I claim is unwarranted. A general classification of the development of liberal thought10 proves how the principles of classical liberalism could be considered first constructive, then unconstructive in accommodating nationalist claims. This would leave the relationship between classical liberalism and nationalism in confusion and without a clear answer. Early attempts to reconcile liberalism and nationalism have been met with suspicion because liberalism as an ideology “has been ambivalent towards the aspirations of ethnocultural groups” because it is “quintessentially an individualistic theory” and at the same 8

J. S. Mill, “On Liberty,” in J.S. Mill on Liberty in Focus, ed. John Gray and G.W. Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 72-3. 9 Patrick Loobuyck, “Intrinsic and Equal Human Worth in a Secular Worldview. Fictionalism in Human Rights Discourse,” Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies 9 (2004): 58-63.; Helen Stacy, “Human Rights in a Fragmenting World.” Paper presented at the 10th Annual Conference on “The Individual vs. the State,” Central European University, Budapest, 14-16 June 2002. 10 See for example Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 35.

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time it is “committed at a very deep level to the idea of toleration.”11 For liberals, the rights of self-government and self-determination are the two sides of the same coin, which, when applied to the issue of the relationship between national identity and state identity, lead to a contradiction of constitutive principles of the nation-state: territorial integrity of the state vs. national self-determination of the peoples.12 Building on this false optimism for classic liberalism, phenomena of nationalism are usually divided into two kinds: civic nationalism – concerned with individual rights and civic principles, also called Western nationalism, versus ethnic nationalism – centered on ensuring the long term reproduction of a specific group, usually regarded as Eastern nationalism.13 While in the relevant literature civic/Western nationalism is considered to be consistent with the liberal principles, ethnic/Eastern nationalism is seen as being inconsistent with the liberal values. It is important to underline this distinction, as minority nationalism in general is regarded ethnic nationalism, therefore inherently inconsistent with liberal-democratic principles, since it is concerned with the preservation of the minority group. Nevertheless, I would argue that the distinction of civil and ethnic foundations of political society, although often cited in the literature, is theoretically insufficient, as “civil liberal and ethnic communitarian traditions are not as opposed as they may seem.”14 Another problem with drawing up these two main types of nationalism – civic vs. ethnic – is that many states of the world employ an “uneasy mix of these two,”15 and states behave in different ways at different times making it hard to distinguish which form of nationalism is practiced (see for example the revised laws of German naturalization of different immigrants). In this sense, one can claim that every nationalism contains both civic and ethnic elements16 (Canada, considered by many the ‘most pluralist’ country would be the perfect example, as this is true for both Anglophone and Francophone nationalism) because in modernity, culture contains both political components and ethnic elements, therefore ethnic and civic nationalism are not in dichotomy but intermingling elements of one and the same ideology. In fact, modern nation building is a dialectic of civil institutional demands and na-

11

Will Kymlicka and Ian Shapiro, “Introduction,” in Ethnicity and Group Rights Nomos XXXIX, ed. Will Kymlicka and Ian Shapiro (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 4. 12 Hoffman 1998, 204-9. 13 Kymlicka 1995, 24. 14 Jiri Priban, “Reconstituting Paradise Lost: the temporal dimension of postcommunist constitutionmaking” (September 12, 2003). Center for the Study of Law and Society Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program. Paper 16, http://repositories.cdlib.org/csls/lss/16/ (accessed August 2009). 15 Hoffman 1998, 214. 16 Smith 1991, 13.

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tional/ethnic claims as liberalism and nationalism often complemented each other in the struggle for democracy in modern history.17 In conclusion, I argue that instead of focusing on the different elements that nationalism may contain, or on typologies of the different forms nationalism can assume, it is more advantageous for our understanding to concentrate on the important distinction whether nationalism, no matter what form it takes or what elements it contains, can be compatible with the liberal-democratic principles or not. One can conceive of two ways to achieve equal citizenship: the classical liberal one would aim to separate citizenship from identity and culture, while the second approach, what I call cultural pluralism, would assure equal standing for minority cultures and unlike liberalism, would retain cultural connotations of citizenship.18 Let us now examine each alternative in more details. Based on 19th century liberalism, the idea of the political nation rests on three pillars specifically. The first pillar is the already noted stand on equality, where everyone is equal before the law, while no one is above the law. Second, at the same time, the state, while being politically and legally neutral, is not culturally neutral – it is rather based on the cultural identity and traditions of the majority group. While assimilation is not mandatory, voluntary assimilation into the majority group is desirable. Third, there are no collective rights in the republic as no collectivity can enjoy permanent privileges. Accordingly, classical liberal theory supports the idea of the neutrality of the state, which means that public action should disregard all differences among citizens including family loyalties, individual, national or religious affiliations, or their social and economic position, so as to treat them all as equals. While it seems that classical liberalism could solve the problem of majorities and minorities, I claim that such optimism is unwarranted because one can never fully remove identity from citizenship. Even if coerced assimilation is unacceptable, and in terms of the law the state should be neutral, ethnic minorities would still be expected to assimilate (and this choice would be rational, too), thus this logic predicts for minorities a slow extinction in the long run and therefore cannot be an impartial or fair solution to the minorities in question. On the contrary, liberal democracy can be characterized as comprising two elements: it provides for basic rights and the participation of all citizens in the formation and decision-making of the state authorities and at the same time protects minorities from majoritarian rule. Rights are understood as the embodiment of individual autonomy, liberty and equality, and as such they present the con17 18

Priban 2003, 9-10. Gutmann quoted in Pamela Johnston Conover, Donald D. Searing, and Ivor Crewe, “The Elusive Ideal of Equal Citizenship: Political Theory and Political Psychology in the United States and Great Britain,” Journal of Politics 66.4 (2004): 1036-1068. 1037.

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straint to the democratic majority rule: in this sense we talk about constitutionalism as the principle and arrangement devoted to the protection of minorities. This is justified by the liberal belief in the equal moral worth of each and every individual, her autonomy, and the corresponding right of preserving one’s identity, which importantly includes the right to change one’s identity if one decides so. I claim that it should be central to constitutional liberal democracy that the individual has a right to choose his/her identity and political alignment. As all individuals are unique, with intellectual and political differences, to deny these in the name of the nation, or any other substantively identified group or set of values, is in the logic of authoritarianism, no matter whether we are talking about members of majorities or minorities. In conclusion, I argue that liberal constitutional democracy, properly understood, is an inclusive and context sensitive arrangement. If this is accurate, then it could be argued that liberalism is both conceptually and institutionally capable of providing an adequate framework for managing ethnic diversity.19 Let me now turn to liberal (forms of) nationalism in more detail. The definition of liberal nationalism is given by Yael Tamir, who declares that “[liberal] nationalism is a theory about the eminence of national-cultural membership and historical continuity, and the importance of perceiving one’s present life and one’s future development as an experience shared with others.”20 This theory is “by nature polycentric” meaning that it recognizes diversity and plurality of the national phenomenon, and consecutively the development of individualized identity, where dignity – universalistic and egalitarian – plays a crucial role. On the other hand, Tamir also breaks away from the traditional socio-cultural discourse of nationalism21 that sees the state owned by the nation when she argues – similarly to what Herder argued – that the “economic future lies in cross-national cooperation, therefore linguistic and cultural differences will be overcome in the future and the dominant system will be both multinational and multicultural.”22 Why do we have the modern preoccupation with identity and recognition? This is mainly due to the dissolution of social hierarchies as the basis of honor in the 18th century. Modern culture also translates into a new form of inwardness, an attempt to discover oneself, one’s own particular way of being. Originally, Rousseau also defined morality as following a voice of nature within us, and Herder similarly considered that individuals are entitled with an original way of 19

Anita Inder Singh, “Minorities, Justice and Security in Post-Communist Europe: Continuing the Debate with Will Kymlicka,” Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe, 4.2 (2002): 1-9; Nenad Dimitrijevic, “Ethno-Nationalized States of Eastern Europe: Is There a Constitutional Alternative?,” Studies in East European Thought 54.4 (2002): 245-269. 247. 20 Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 79-81. 21 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). 22 Tamir 1993, 164-65.

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being human. In this light, self-fulfillment and self-realization mean being true to my originality, which only I can articulate and discover. And as Herder applies the same principle not only to individuals but peoples (volk), too, it seems that the spread of politics of universalism, equal rights, and democracy, liberal nationalism looks like a natural development.23 Based on this individualistic approach, the classical doctrine of liberal nationalism seems to be able to reconcile the opposing democratic and egalitarian impulses of nationalism with its discriminatory policies towards minorities. The solution offered to overcome the conflict between strategies of assimilation and exclusion and recognition of different minority cultures is the separation of the public and private domains of life, also known as the principle of ‘benign neglect’ applied to ethnic tensions.24 The principle of ‘benign neglect’ rests on the assumption of moral equality of all citizens that requires the state to treat all citizens as equal persons. Neutrality of the state can be established either in the justification of state action or with reference to the consequences of this action. In conflicting situations, the state either decides by reference to previously agreed norms (for example laws), or it does not interfere at all. In other words, the theory of liberal legitimation is used for justification of state neutrality, as the state is feasible only if it has some kind of authority over all of its subjects, but this authority must be justified by public reasons, readily accessible for all citizens.25 Liberal nationalists argue that by separating the public and private realms of life, the state can treat all citizens as equals, without depriving them of their convictions or cultural traditions. “Thus, people are free to cultivate their particular life styles and they can foster their particular culture in the private domain without this freedom demolishing political equality.”26 In this way, the public domain is that of a homogeneous national culture, but the private sphere remains open to the diversity of ethnic cultures. Based on the liberal argument, while the state has the right to maintain the former, it has no right to interfere in the latter. According to this principle, the state cannot interfere in disputes of different

23

Charles Taylor, “The Dynamics of Democratic Exclusion,” Journal of Democracy 9.4 (1998): 2931. 24 Miodrag A. Jovanovic, “Territorial Autonomy in Eastern Europe - Legacies of the Past,” Journal of Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe 4.1 (2004): http://www.ecmi.de/jemie/download /Focus4-2002_Jovanovic_Kymlicka.pdf (accessed August 2009). 25 Zoltán Szente, “Semleges-E a Semlegesség Elve? (Is the Principle of Neutrality Neutral?),” BUKSZ 2 (1998): 1-2; Tamás Gyõrfi, “Az Állam Semlegességének Elve Az Alkotmányjogban (The Principle of State Neutrality in Constiutional Law),” Jogelméleti Szemle 3.3 (2003): http:// jesz.ajk.elte.hu/gyorfi15.html, 3 (accessed, August 2009). 26 Kis 2002, 10.

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conceptions of ‘good life,’ it cannot value these as positive or negative, and it cannot offer a ‘best conception of good life’ either.27 The main argument of the liberal nationalists is that properly framed liberalism and nationalism point in the same direction: that of a nation state, where equality before the law is secured for all. As such, liberal nationalism is “nationalism constrained by citizens’ rights, political equality, and the rule of law.”28 Accordingly, liberalism and nationalism converge on the same set of political principles, they only differ in the solutions offered for questions regarding the democratic state. Nationalism is a motivational solution for the democratic state, since it brings the reasons why citizens should be loyal to the state. The question for liberalism is a justificational one, as it sets the conditions the state must satisfy in order to be legitimate. Both oppose the political recognition of conationals in the public realm but for different reasons: nationalism argues there is no mutual solidarity between different ethnic groups, while liberalism wants to protect equality against collective bodies and recognizes only individuals, arguing there cannot be a state within the state.29 This lack of recognition of co-nationals is the main difficulty of liberal nationalism. I claim that while state neutrality in religious policy institutionalized religious equality, in ethno-cultural policy it institutionalized ethno-cultural inequality, although a less extreme form than illiberal nationalism advocates. Take for example the official language policy, which would invest the majority group with the privilege of having its own language as the official language. Liberal nationalists would argue that this is fair as long as the state discriminates with a rational goal (for example, one language for all is needed to run the state effectively), assimilation is open and non-mandatory, and there is no discrimination in private life. The problem is that although minorities would have the right to use their mother tongue, as long as this remains a matter of personal business, the original asymmetry between the majority and minority groups is maintained, thus questioning equality for all – the basic premise for liberalism. Let me now turn towards more detailed criticism of liberal nationalism. Critiques of liberal nationalism can be grouped in three main groups: the communitarians, the egalitarian liberals, and the multicultural liberals. I shall first discuss the communitarian critique, which is the most radical one, followed by the attempts of multicultural liberals, such as Kymlicka, to save liberalism, and then I shall conclude with the arguments put forward by supporters of egalitarian liberalism, which I employ in developing my concept of multicultural pluralism as a theory integrating multicultural and egalitarian liberalism. 27 28 29

Szente 1998," 2; Kis 2002, 10-11. Kis 2002, 8. Kis 2002, 8-10.

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The liberal model of citizenship is individualistic as is well reflected in the works of Rawls and Dworkin. Rawls considers the political community not a cultural community but a contractual framework of rights to guarantee individual autonomy. This is a thin conception of citizenship, void of any cultural content, as the state is supposedly neutral among different ways of life.30 Communitarian arguments reject this liberal account of citizenship as unrealistic and undesirable. According to them, liberalism is inhospitable to ethnic differences because it insists on uniform application of rules and it is suspicious of collective rights. To answer this criticism, liberal nationalist argue that it is only the public sphere where the state should be neutral, in the private sphere all cultures can be freely practiced. They seemingly successfully argue that unlike the communitarian claim, a shared conception of the ‘good life’ is not necessary for the development of solidarity in the community. Yet, communitarians argue that culture cannot be deleted from the notion of citizenship because the individual members of communities gain their understanding of the world based on learning from their communities because individuals do not exist in a cultural vacuum. They claim individual identity can be understood only through communities, as members adopt their moral principles from their communities.31 This is the reason why Taylor argues that every liberalism in fact is majority nationalism, as supposedly neutral principles of liberalism are in fact reflections of a hegemonic culture, “a particularism masquerading as the universal.”32 Following this logic, the crucial feature of human life is its fundamentally dialogical character. We define our identity in dialogue with ‘significant others.’ Others become part of our identity, and the contribution of others to our identity continues indefinitely. This is why the difference-blind liberal principle of equal respect is always in conflict: on the one hand it supports different-blind policies and on the other it fosters particular identities. As such, difference-blind liberalism cannot offer a neutral ground where all cultures could meet and coexist, and cannot accommodate what distinct societies want: the survival of their group, which is a collective goal.33 To sum up, on the one hand, liberals fear the valorization of communities because they argue that communitarians conflate citizenship with nationality, and on the other hand, communitarians claim that state neutrality leaves no place for the public good, and cannot explain what glues together the political community.

30

Conover, Searing and Crewe 2004. Ibid. 1039-40. 32 Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”: An Essay, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 25-73. 43. 33 Ibid. 32-62. 31

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Critics claim that the inability of liberal nationalism to offer genuine minority protection comes from a major distinction between religious and ethnocultural affiliations. Accordingly, while religious conviction entails a choice between the true and false faith, the choice of ethno-cultural affiliation is not one between true and false, good or bad, right and wrong, but a simple choice between “this” and the “other.”34 This leads to the assumption that if minorities want more of the advantages of the majority, they can simply crossover into the majority groups. Voluntary assimilation is welcome by the liberals, as it does not violate the principles of freedom and equality. Nevertheless, even if the state does not encourage assimilation by coercion nor obstructs assimilation of the minorities, in the long run this would lead to all groups becoming a single nation, as it is rationally advantageous for everybody to assimilate. As such, minorities are still in a disadvantaged situation because ethnic affiliation is given (and even if it is chosen) which would render their choice not free but restricted.35 The problem is that while the liberal nationalists argue that changing one’s culture and language does not require one to change his/her convictions and beliefs, one can argue that the decision to change community membership “jolts the entire personality.”36 Accordingly, while liberals rightfully claim that changing community membership is neither impossible nor impermissible, they do not take into consideration the true costs of assimilation. Kymlicka has argued similarly that leaving one’s culture is difficult and historically minorities opposed such moves (see for example Switzerland, Belgium, or Canada). While the costs of assimilation will be different (and supposedly higher) for historical minorities (like Hungarians, Germans or Russians in different European states) than for immigrants (in the US, Canada, or Australia, where minorities are largely immigrants), some might not even be capable of a change of lifestyle, and even for those capable, such a change is a personal burden. This is because changing ethno-cultural membership does not mean only adopting the high culture of the new community (as liberals argue) but also a change in everyday practices is required. Unless one manages to master both the high culture and the everyday practices of his/her adopted community, he/she faces the danger of not being fully accepted, becoming a newcomer, which is almost the same disadvantage as he/she was subject to originally.37 As noted by Raz, the only way that changing cultures would be readily acceptable is if the minority culture disintegrated.38 34

Kis 2002, 13; Szente 1998, 12-4. Kis 2002, 13; Szente 1998, 12-4. Kis 2002, 13. 37 Kis 2002, 13-15. 38 Carl Knight, “Liberal Multiculturalism Reconsidered,” Politics 24.3 (2004): 189-197. 195. 35 36

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We have seen that the choice of assimilation is not only a morally difficult decision, but assimilation in all areas of life cannot be completed as quickly and completely as liberal nationalists assume. Assimilation is a long-time process that involves both costs and risks for those undertaking it. As a result, I subscribe to the view that “[o]ne cannot be a consistent liberal and a consistent nationalist at the same time.”39 Bhikhu Parekh has argued similarly that although assimilation would bring more advantages and more options to revise the way of life for minorities, only gradual assimilation is possible.40 Facing this critique of liberal nationalism, one has two alternatives to choose from: first, the liberal state should be entirely ethnically neutral or, second, the liberal state should acknowledge and try to balance the differences between the political privileges of the majorities and those of the minorities. The first alternative of ridding the state of all ethno-cultural elements might seem attractive to many. Nevertheless, I hope to have demonstrated that this attractive solution is not free from serious flaws since the separation between the state and ethnicity is never complete and there is little chance that this requirement is applied consistently by a contemporary liberal state. In order to function, the state has to decide on questions such as: what is (are) the official language(s), what are the official holidays, or what is (are) the official history (ies) of the state. Just for the sake of argument, even if the program of ethnically neutral state was possible, the resulting state would be one without a political community, a state that could not command the loyalty of its citizens, nor would there be any solidarity among its citizens.41 Since a proposed ethnically neutral state would leave questions of political loyalty and of the basis of the community unanswered, let us consider more complex solutions based on the second alternative that recognizes the importance of distinct group identities within the liberal state. This alternative is referred to as multinationalism or multiculturalism in the relevant literature. Actually, if we take the communitarian proposition which is on its own a model of citizenship, one could argue along Miller that multicultural pluralism is somewhere in the middle between the liberal and the rival communitarian model.42 As such, multiculturalism is the ideology of diversity, an answer to the needs of a changing world and the challenges faced by the nation-state and the international arena. It is little surprise that this approach was so readily embraced by countries such as Canada or the United Kingdom. Compared to liberal democracy, multicultural 39

Kis 2002, 15. Parekh quoted in Knight 2004 195. Kis 2002, 15. 42 Miller quoted in Conover, Searing, and Crewe 2004, 1038; Sammy Smooha, “The Model of Ethnic Democracy,” in The Fate of Ethnic Democracy in Post-Communist Europe, ed. Sammy Smooha and Priit Jarve (Budapest: Open Society Foundation 2005), 5-60. 6. 40 41

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democracy is less assimilating and less exclusionary, as it makes room for cultural diversity and seeks to integrate, while avoiding the imposition of assimilation or exclusion of some groups from the polity and society.43 While Mill has argued that democracy is close to impossible in multi-national societies,44 I will show this is not an impossible task, although as Lijphart rightfully claimed, it is difficult to arrange for stable government in pluralist societies.45 Ethnocultural diversity is a challenge for both political philosophy and social practice, since the concepts of the nation-state, political community, social integration, citizenship, or representative democracy, are all confronted by the nationalist ideas, which give preference to the majority, that often leads to a democratic and a liberal deficit.46 I argue that in an ethnically divided society, if the state wants to treat all citizens as equals, it has to be a multi-national state, recognizing multiple cultures and traditions as its own. It must provide assistance to members of disadvantaged groups. Multiculturalism (as proposed by Kymlicka and Parekh) also acknowledges that recognition and maintenance of one’s cultural identity is a primary goal that one cannot give up.47 It is important to stress that multiculturalism carries the “lightest philosophical baggage,”48 since unlike theories of Mill, Kant or even Raz, multiculturalism identifies ‘good life’ only in a limited fashion: as life lived “from the inside and the outside.”49 This conception of ‘good life’ is derived from Rawls and Dworkin as it notes two preconditions for freedom: individuals must have resources and liberties to live their lives according to their beliefs and they must be allowed to question their values. What this means is that people should live according to their beliefs, but since they are fallible beings they should be able to revise these beliefs. On its turn, the fallible nature of human beings is the justification for the autonomy or the freedom of choice that empowers decisions and beliefs to be re-evaluated.50 Many contest the alliance of multiculturalism and liberalism made by Kymlicka. For example, Brian Barry51 favors the traditional liberal nationalist publicprivate distinction for dealing with conflicting claims of cultures because he 43

Sandu Frunza, “Pluralism Si Multiculturalism (Pluralism and Multiculturalism),” Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies 9 (2004): 136-41; Smooha 2005, 14. Mill 1991, 46. 45 Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971). 46 Levente Salat, “Multikulturális demokrácia? (Multicultural Democracy?).” Regio - Kissebbség, Politika, Társadalom 13.1 (2002): 206, 211. 47 Knight 2004, 191; Taylor 1994, 61. 48 Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (London: Macmillan Press, 2000), 99. 49 Kymlicka 1995, 81. 50 Knight 2004, 189-90; Parekh 2000, 99. 51 Brian Barry, Culture and Equality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). 44

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argues that it is logically impossible to recognize all cultures as equal. This is because cultures have propositional content of what is true/false, right/wrong and these judgments cannot all be simultaneously confirmed but at best only tolerated. Jacob Levy argues similarly that the multiculturalist assumption of “one’s pre-existing culture included resources for judging all others in the world”52 is hardly respectful. Nevertheless, I would still argue that this understanding of multiculturalism is mistaken as the concept of autonomy present in multicultural pluralism comprises both civil and personal liberties as it stresses both the importance of constitutional government and freedom of conscience. Thus, multiculturalism involves a conception of autonomy as an intermediary between traditional liberal and communitarian conceptions, where autonomy means making choices among options societal culture provides, and makes those options meaningful.53 The point to stress is that the individual capacity for autonomy is developed on a (societal) cultural basis. Furthermore, societal cultures can change radically and are often pluralistic. Thus, individuals are ‘cultural creatures’ not by the communitarian sense of being constituted by their culture but in the sense that culture is essential to their development as human beings.54 While liberal nationalism claims that state neutrality can be maintained by separating the private and public domains, multiculturalism would propose that liberal equality and neutrality in state action can be achieved only if different groups would possess different rights, more precisely, minority groups should benefit from recognition and protection from the majority. Unfortunately, neither liberal nationalism nor multiculturalism can give an answer to the so-called impossibility charge: the state is often dealing with issues that have no neutral solution, and if there are many such issues, the principle of neutrality empties. I claim it is egalitarian liberal theory that could be a liberal alternative that includes resources for judging all conflicting cultural claims, and what matters is not whether these cultures have propositional content of what is true/false, right/ wrong but that all competing conceptions are treated as equals – as demanded by multiculturalism. In cases with no neutral solution, the state should make a ‘comparative burden test’ and adopt the decision that is least burdensome to those involved. After the decision of the state is taken, the burden resulting from it must be compensated by the state, and, what is more important is that the decision must be open to further negotiation, thus giving the chance for the losing 52

Levy quoted in Christian Joppke, “The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and Policy,” The British Journal of Sociology 55.2 (2004): 237-257. 238. Kymlicka 1995, 83. 54 Stephen Deets, “Liberal Pluralism: Does the West Have Any to Export?,” Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe 4 (2002): http://www.ecmi.de/jemie/download/Focus42002_Deets.pdf (accessed August 2009): 4; Parekh 2000, 100. 53

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side to eventually become the winner.55 I claim that as long as the comparative burden test is not discriminating it can stand up to the liberal requirements and would also satisfy multiculturalist demands. This way issues with no neutral solution would not be confined to the private sphere (as liberal nationalists would suggest), but would be at the foremost place of public life, always open for renegotiation. I call this combination of egalitarian liberalism and multicultural recognition multicultural pluralism. Nevertheless, scholars like Sartori claim that pluralism in the political realm and multiculturalism are not the same. Accordingly, unlike pluralism, multiculturalism is not characterized by voluntary membership, multiple affiliation and mutual recognition but by involuntary and exclusive statuses and recognition is only demanded from the majority side.56 The reason why multiculturalism differs from liberal tolerance is the unilaterality of recognition, but I claim that the principle of reciprocity can and should be part of multiculturalism, and mutual recognition would be one of the pre-conditions for meaningful participation of all members of society.57 I argue that pluralism also shifted from ‘old’ to ‘new’ pluralism that is characterized by deep divisions, a number of overlapping dimensions: cultural, social, epistemic; and cultural diversity is salient in all aspects of today’s world. As a result, the concept of toleration also shifted from toleration of views to toleration of structures for communication. In this sense I claim that tolerance can be considered as a minimum discursive openness. Deliberative toleration in the weak sense would mean that when making decisions, others’ reasons should be included for consideration no matter whether they are public or not. In the strong sense it means that all citizens have a democratic entitlement to contribute to the definition of society, therefore their perspectives that inform their reasons must be recognized. While deliberative toleration must be justified to all, at the same time it rejects both neutrality and autonomy, and as a result liberal toleration as something culturally specific: imposing liberal norms and a moral doctrine based on the conception of autonomy.58 One can claim the pluralist justification for deliberative toleration lies in the fact that democracy is a complex ideal, which should always seek reflexive equilibrium and should ensure that the widest possible range of perspectives are accounted for. This is justified as there is no single form of justification or set of reasons to appeal to, furthermore, the components of ideal democracy are often opposed to each other. Democratic legitimacy cannot be secured merely by de55

Kis 1997; Kis 2002, 11; Szente 1998, 3-4. Joppke 2004, 237-43. 57 James Bohman, “Deliberative Toleration,” Political Theory 31.6 (2003): 757-779. 767. 58 Ibid. 763-6. 56

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liberation of leaders but by a plurality of group members with divergent interests and circumstances to answer for the need for democratic inclusion in culturally plural societies. Deliberative toleration thus creates the possibility for a more pluralist society than liberal nationalism would allow, with accommodation and entitlement to change the regime for all.59 As such, unlike classical liberalism and liberal nationalism, multicultural pluralism is willing to weigh the importance of universal laws against the importance of cultural survival, which is a collective goal for communities. Although the theory of multicultural pluralism shares with liberalism the desire of equal citizenship, it aims to replace the traditional liberal concept of thin citizenship with an understanding of citizens as members of cultural communities, who are different but equally respected.60 Achieving this is only possible through affirmative action and minority rights that require that on issues such as the use of language, schooling, local public administration, the liberal state has to provide different rights for different groups in different contexts in order to achieve harmony between freedom and equality. Multicultural pluralism is centered on providing civil and personal liberties that include not only political and cultural but also the social and economic rights of the individual and the group alike. We must stress that multicultural pluralism, although it accepts culture and identity as sources of power, is not about the cultivation of cultural differences but about resolving the inequalities in power between the majority and minority groups. It also claims that too much insistence on culture (the case of the communitarian approach) leads only to a backlash and a danger of illiberal groups, allowing for child brides, fundamentalist home schooling, or failure to take children to hospital when critically injured due to religious beliefs. In other words, multicultural pluralism recognizes identity and the need to protect identity but also stresses the relational nature of all identities, and the need to guarantee that one must be allowed to re-evaluate decisions and beliefs even against the will of the group. As such, multicultural pluralism is an integration of multicultural liberalism and egalitarian liberalism as foundations for group-differentiated rights. It is therefore made up by a combination of multiculturalism – the affirmation of some clear-cut identities – and interculturalism – that stands for the increased interdependence among cultures, which excludes separationist/exclusivist stands on culture, and a third feature, liberal equality that is promoted by minority rights.61

59

Monique Deveaux, “A Deliberative Approach to Conflicts of Culture,” Political Theory 31.6 (2003): 780-807. 783; Bohman 2003, 772-4. 60 Conover 2004, 1039. 61 Frunza 2004, 137-42.

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Although the desires for civic identity and assimilation often hinder the multicultural pluralist ideal, many contemporary states (Canada would be the first example) have already successfully achieved a liberal democratic ideal of equal citizenship coupled with a successful institutionalization of civil, political, and social rights for minorities in their political systems that would characterize multicultural pluralism. Unfortunately, law is often more progressive than society, and many minorities are still denied equal standing and citizenship is still conflated with ethnocultural characteristics of the privileged group (see for example ‘republican’ France’s treatment of its African-origin immigrants or the issue of Britishness, which has only civic connotations for one in London, while Scots or Irish could claim it is based partly on ethnic elements foreign to them).62 It is often that groups fear that the multicultural nature of modern society threatens their identity, their civic bonds and social solidarity. But this fear is coupled with another interesting puzzle that the research must face: in today’s world, cultures are becoming more and more transparent and as culture is getting more and more liberalized, group members share fewer and fewer values but at the same time people value their cultural membership more and more, which leads to an increased sense of nationhood/ethnicity. The argument put forward is that increasing interdependence in today’s world (globalization), the increased ease with which cultures can interact with one-another due to the development of communication technologies, puts more pressure on cultures than ever before. Cultures are in constant interaction with each other, which in turn leads to a constant redefinition of all cultures. While this continuous redefinition will result in more and more liberalized cultures as cultures borrow from each other, at the same time, it also puts tremendous pressures on individual self-identification. To understand this paradox, one needs to turn towards the role of cultural membership in people’s self identity where “national identity serves as the ‘primary foci of identification’ because it is based on belonging not accomplishment.”63 This is important also because national identity is often non-congruous with national borders. In this sense, a multicultural national identity does not rest on shared values, norms or even a shared territory, and thus provides secure foundation for individual autonomy and self-identity.64 In a multicultural pluralist state, the loyalty of the citizens should be not to the nation but to the common public good, such as the constitution. Some might fear that multicultural pluralism will lead to the break-up of the union of cultures, but these views can be challenged by the facts of today, where we witness more and more regional integration, the breaking down of older identities, with modern cultures becoming increasingly 62 63 64

Conover 2004, 1062-4. Kymlicka 1995, 87-9. Parekh 2000, 101.

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more transparent and thus allowing for feeling of common belonging to develop across multiple ethnicities. I also argue that “[t]he ingredients of liberal societies, most importantly political pluralism, legal constitutionalism and markets,”65 contain multicultural possibilities that have not been fully explored yet. The greatest promise of today’s increased emphasis on pluralism and divided sovereignty is that it provides for a greater discursive space for minority rights and the multicultural pluralist conception of ethnic accommodation to be based not on discretionary domestic policies and ad-hoc compromises to maintain international stability, but on considerations of justice.

65

Joppke 2004, 254.

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New Lessons for (and from) the Old World: A study of the politicisation of regional identity in Nova Scotia & North East England Allan Craigie

In his introductory lecture at the Negotiating Diversity Conference, Bhikhu Parekh stated that even without immigration, Canada and Europe would still have to deal with issues of diversity. Lord Parekh’s statement was correct; Canada and Europe are two extremely diverse jurisdictions. Canada is a continentspanning state, representing the union of separate colonies and two major linguistic groups. Europe is a collection of ancient nations and states currently undergoing one of the modern era’s most exciting political experiments: the European Union. Both are experiencing high levels of immigration from all corners of the earth while their birth rates decline. However, to understand how states deal with issues of diversity one must be aware of the various manifestations of diversity within a state, and how they fit within larger patterns of accommodation and integration. This chapter attempts to explore one aspect of diversity: territorial diversity at the sub-state level. In particular, it focuses on the relationship between substate nationalism on the one hand and regionalism within the majority nation on the other. Using the regions of Nova Scotia (a province) and the North East of England (a Government Office Region), this chapter will determine whether regional elites politicised regional identities in a manner similar to that of the neighbouring sub-state nations. The key difference between Nova Scotia and the North East of England is the existence of an elected government in Nova Scotia, the House of Assembly, and the lack of a comparable institution in the North East. To examine the relationship between sub-state nationalism and regionalism in Britain and Canada, this begins with an analysis of the political context of the cases, followed by an examination of centre-periphery relations. Next it explores how the sub-state nations are framed in the regions, and concludes with a discussion of the lessons that can be drawn from this comparative study. Regionalism is an elite-driven appeal to a collective identity; as a result this research focuses on elite discourse. As territorial communities are built upon

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communication networks,1 this chapter examines political debates within the communication networks of Nova Scotia and the North East between 1990-2004, a period of heightened nationalist agitation in Scotland and Quebec. Parliamentary debates, newspaper accounts, and party manifestos were examined and elite interviews conducted. The data presented below is the author’s interpretation of this discourse. Context: The Sub-State Nations and Political Opportunity Canada is practically a ‘pure type’ federation with power divided constitutionally between state and provincial levels. The people of Canada have, in Simeon’s language, a ‘federal ideal’2 manifesting as a “decoupling”3 of the federal and provincial political networks.4 In Europe, some states are federal, others unitary, and some exist in constitutional middle grounds, such as semi-federal Spain. To provide contrast to the Canadian model, this paper uses Britain as its comparison. Even post Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish devolution, Britain remains a highly centralised political system, with the centre maintaining much power over the minority nations.5 While almost complete opposites on a federal-unitary axis, Canada and Britain do have one very important commonality: vocal sub-state nationalism. While there has always been an undercurrent of nationalism in Scotland and Quebec, it became more threatening (from the state’s point of view) beginning in the 1960s, and currently both the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the Bloc/ Parti Quebecois are major political players in Britain and Canada, with the SNP recently unseating Labour’s fifty-year rule over Scotland. Political opportunity structure can be defined as a change in the political order, which creates incentives for political actors. It is not a model for movement, rather a “set of clues for

1

Michael Mann, Sources of Social Power: The Rise of Classes and Nation States, 1760-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry Into the Foundations of Nationality (London: MIT Press, 1966). 2 Richard Simeon, Federal-Provincial Diplomacy: The Making of Recent Policy in Canada. 3rd Ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). 3 Dan Hough and Charlie Jeffery “Elections in Multi-level Systems: Lessons from the UK and abroad,” in The State of the Nations 2003 The Third Year of Devolution in the UK, ed.Robert Hazell (London: The Constitution Unit, 2003), 239-261. 250 4 Charlie Jeffrey and Daniel Wincott, “Devolution in the United Kingdom: Statehood and Citizenship in Transition,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 36.1 (2006): 3-18. 5 Stephen Tierney, “Giving with one hand: Scottish devolution within a unitary state,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 5.4 (2007): 730-753.

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when contentious politics will emerge.”6 By this definition, the state’s reaction to nationalism in Quebec and Scotland created opportunities for regional elites when both states entered into periods of constitutional questioning. In Canada, the constitution has long been debated, but the nature of the state was pushed to the limit when the Parti Quebecois formed government in Quebec in 1976, in turn hosting a referendum on sovereignty in 1980.7 This was followed by a period of heavy constitutional negotiation culminating with a new Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As Quebec did not agree to the new constitution, attempts were made to bring it into the constitutional fold through the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords. Both failed, the latter through a national referendum in 1992. The referendum was followed by the 1993 election, which witnessed the rise of the Reform Party of Canada in Western Canada and the Bloc Quebecois in Quebec. Overall the party system fragmented into competing regional blocs. Shortly thereafter, the government of Quebec held another referendum, which was narrowly won by the federalists, and the federal government launched a campaign to keep Quebec in Canada through legislative means (the Clarity Act, Regional Veto Act) rather than through attempts to increase Quebec’s sense of ‘Canadianness.’ These legislative efforts were supplemented by the Supreme Court Reference re Quebec Succession.8 In 1960s Britain, the SNP made an electoral breakthrough and emerged as a major player, by the 1970s they were challenging Labour’s traditional dominance in Scotland. During the 1970s, the nature of the British state was brought into question and referenda on devolution were held in Scotland and Wales, both

6

7

8

Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. 2nd Ed. (Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 20. While the question in Quebec was not technically about independence, according to Whitaker (1995: 195), the wording was so confusing that this is the only possible interpretation. Alain-G. Gagnon and Raffaelle Iacovino, Federalism, Citizenship and Québec: Debating Multinationalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Christian Lammert, “Nationalist Movements and the State,” Zeitschrift fur Kanada-Studien 21.2 (2001): 135-151; Denis Stairs, Canada and Québec After Québecois Secession: “Realist” Reflections on an International Relationship (Halifax: Dalhousie University Centre for Foreign Policy Studies, 1997); Gerard Boismenu, “Perspectives on Quebec-Canada Relations in the 1990s: Is the Reconciliation of Ethnicity, Nationality and Citizenship Possible?” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism. XXIII.1-2 (1996): 99-109; Alan C. Cairns, “An Election to be Remembered: Canada 1993,” Canadian Public Policy. XX.3 (1994): 219-234; Peter H. Russell, Constitutional Odyssey: Can Canadians Become a Sovereign People? 2nd Ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Stephan Dion, “The Quebec Challenge to Canadian Unity,” PS: Political Science & Politics. 26.1 (1993): 38-43; Carolyn J. Tuohy, Policy and Politics in Canada: Institutionalised Ambivalence (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).

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of which failed.9 When the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher were elected the ‘doomsday scenario’ emerged; Scotland was to be governed by a party with scant representation or support in Scotland. Public opinion began shifting in Scotland, and devolution became a powerful demand. The Scottish Constitutional Convention was born out of an alliance between Labour and the Liberal Democrats with support from civil society (the SNP and Scottish Conservatives were not involved). Once Labour returned to power another referendum was held and the vast majority of Scots voted in favour of a Scottish Parliament. This was followed by a series of reforms in England at the regional level as part of a (weak) Labour commitment to bring democratically elected regional government to England. The regional reforms in England ended with the overwhelming defeat of the government’s proposals in the 2004 North East Regional Assembly referendum.10 These political changes in Canada and Britain had the following effects: 1. Attempts to accommodate sub-state nationalism caused the state to enter into a period of constitutional change and negotiation; consequently, 2. The question of ‘who we are’ became politicised at both the national and regional level. According to McAdam et al., the analysis of political opportunity attempts to examine “the political circumstances that have an effect on the emergence, structure, scope and success of social movements.”11 It is the study of how changing constraints and incentives affect political actors and it can be seen through a variety of lenses, such as legal repression, access to resources, and so forth. The political environment changes for regional actors in the majority nation when identity becomes politicised. Friction between the majority and minority nations can lead to debates on the nature of the state and its underpinning values at the 9

While a clear majority of voters in Scotland voted ‘yes,’ in order for the referendum to pass, 40% of the overall electorate had to vote in favour of it; therefore not voting was tantamount to a ‘no’ vote. 10 Alan Trench, “Introduction: The Dynamics of Devolution,” in The Dynamics of Devolution: The State of the Nations 2005, ed. Alan Trench (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005), 1-7; Alan Trench, ed., Has Devolution Made a Difference? The State of the Nations 2004 (London: Imprint Acaemic, 2004); Robert Hazell, ed., The State and the Nations: The First Year of Devolution in the United Kingdom (London: Imprint Academic, 2000); Robert Hazell, ed., The State of the Nations 2001: The Second Year of Devolution in the United Kingdom (London: Imprint Academic, 2001); Robert Hazell, ed., The State of the Nations: The Third Year of Devolution in the United Kingdom (London: Imprint Academic, 2003); Peter Lynch, Scottish Government and Politics (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2001); Dennis Kavanagh, Thatcherism and British Politics: End of Consensus? 2nd Ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 11 Mattias Wahlstrom and Abby Peterson “Between the State and the Market: Expanding the Concept of ‘Political Opportunity Structure’,” in Acta Sociologica 49.4 (2006): 363-377.

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state-wide level. The following two sub-sections will examine how this discourse manifested itself in Nova Scotia and the North East vis-à-vis the central government and their neighbouring sub-state nations. Centre-Periphery Relations The relationship between the centre and the peripheries may best be examined through debates surrounding the division of power between the centre and the regions. Centre-periphery relations were examined along two axes; 1) how power is seen to be organised, and 2) regional elite reaction to this organisation. Looking at the underlying complaints in the regions, it becomes clear that while they may manifest themselves differently, the underlying source of frustration is similar, namely a perceived ‘unfair’ treatment and a lack of “voice” to use Hirschman’s (1970) term.12 As both Canada and Britain are welfare states, one can analyse how perceptions of ‘unfair’ treatment manifest themselves by focusing on how (re)distribution of resources and issues of ‘fairness’ have had an impact on political debates in the regions. The fundamental difference between the way power is divided in Canada and Britain is the sovereign and elected nature of the Canadian provincial parliaments, yet in both states the division of power is in constant flux. In Canada, the constitution outlines the division of powers in a legal sense, but provinces enter into negotiations with the federal government to cooperate in the provision of services,13 whereas in England, the central government has delegated much of its responsibility to regional quangos (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations) and the like. This leads to substantial interplay between the region and the centre, which can in turn be politicised by regional actors. Sub-state levels of government may help decentralise decision-making by allowing national minorities to form regional majorities in certain policy spheres, but Hopkins argues that governments are “power maximisers.”14 Wherever there is multilevel governance, battles over jurisdiction occur as a natural outcome of political competition, therefore government conflict is not an indicator of regionalism or nationalism. Constitutional arrangements can aid the organisation of relations between the majority and minority nations, but no constitutional order 12

Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1970). 13 Simeon 2006; Sujit Choudry, Jean-Francois Gaudreault-Des-Biens and Lorne Sossin, eds., Dilemmas of Solidarity: Rethinking Redistribution in the Canadian Federation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). 14 John Hopkins, “Regional Government in the UE,” in The State and the Nations, ed. Stephen Tindale (London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 1996).

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can avoid the existence of grey areas, which become a source of friction between the different levels of government.15 As constitutions cannot detail every working aspect of the state and the relationships within the state apparatus, Simeon introduces the concept of the “federal ideal,”16 which is the way in which society expects its system to work. If actors in the member nations can be flexible, these grey areas can be managed through negotiation. Yet Simeon’s model assumes that there is a unified understanding, or agreement, of who the ‘people’ in a system are, Tierney refers to this as a “single demos.”17 In multinational states there may be more than one understanding of the nature of the constituent peoples of the state. While constitutional arrangements help shape the political environment, this assumes that constitutional arrangements accommodate minorities as well as integrate the minority and majority nations at the state level in order for the state to function properly; that both the minority and majority nations can reach agreement on the constituent elements of the state. However, there is a temporal aspect to this. Agreement reached in the year X may no longer be viable in the year X + N, especially if major changes in the way the state and society interact occur during period N. Therefore, the stability of multination states may depend less upon their constitutional arrangements, than the elites’ ability to manage conflict. That a sense of neglect is felt in the North East and Nova Scotia comes as no surprise, as literature on the regions from both Britain and Canada has identified this for some time.18 Yet it is how this neglect manifests itself vis-à-vis the division of powers in the North East and Nova Scotia that is important to this discussion. In the North East, the lack of an elected institution has led to a demand for regional decision-making. The demand for more power in the North East is not new. As Labour MEP Joyce Quin (now Baroness Quin) and Roland Boyes MP argued in the Labour Weekly newspaper in 1986: “Most Britons feel a loyalty to their own areas as well as to Britain as a whole and there is a strong feeling that many political decisions taken at national level could be taken closer to home.”19 Yet when the devolution proposals eventually came, not everyone 15

Ronald Cheffins and Patricia Johnson, “The Nature of Constitutions and Constitutionalism,” in Politics: Canada, ed. Paul W. Fox and Graham White. Sixth Ed. (Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 84. 16 Simeon, 2006. 17 Stephen Tierney, “Giving with one hand: Scottish devolution within a unitary state,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 5.4 (2007): 730-753. 18 Helen M. Jewell, The North-South Divide (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); Ernest R. Forbes, The Maritime Rights Movement, 1919-1927: A Study in Canadian Regionalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979). 19 Quoted in Jon Craig, “MPs in plea for regional assembly,” The Journal, March 29, 1986.

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was convinced they would give the region much power. While certain segments of the North Eastern elite favoured greater regional decision-making, this did not carry forward as support for the 2004 referendum. It is important to note that it appears that while the question was clear, voters used it as a way of voicing their opinions on the government without having to worry about changing the government as the North East was and is a Labour stronghold. In the North East discussion centred on increasing regional power, but this was not the case in Nova Scotia where elites believe in the equality of provinces. As such, they were relatively opposed to any restructuring of the federation that could lead to different relationships between citizen and state in other provinces. As stated in Canada: A Country for All, the Report of the Nova Scotia Working Committee on the Constitution: What we found was that the most acceptable of the options was a constitutional recognition of Quebec’s distinct society, provided that a) it be defined in terms similar to those of the federal position paper (i.e. language, culture and civil law); and b) the provinces remain as equal partners within Canada, recognizing that this requires that accommodation of differences.20

Nova Scotian elites were adamant about ensuring equality of citizens and provinces. This is not surprising; as a ‘have not’ province it is in Nova Scotia’s interest to maintain strong federal commitments to ensuring that all Canadians receive the same basic level of services.21 Nova Scotian elites were fully aware of the need for the federal government’s involvement in provincial jurisdiction and across parties actors attempted to ensure that the federal government remained involved in the provision of services in the province. Yet federal involvement also led to competition between governments with regard to being the visible provider of services. As one newspaper account stated: “Since 1989 Ottawa has seized more control of development spending in Atlantic Canada – buying TV and radio ads to increase its visibility – causing deep frictions with provincial officials.”22 As outlined above, governments compete with each other in constitutional grey areas. In Nova Scotia a key ‘grey area’ was the federal government’s spending powers in provincial jurisdictions. A North Eastern concern was that there was too much central involvement in decision-making, that central institutions were not responsive to regional con20

Legislative Assembly of Nova Scotia, A Country for All: The Report of the Nova Scotia Working Committee on the Constitution (Halifax: Legislative Assembly of Nova Scotia, 1991), 20. 21 Maureen MacDonald, “The Impact of a Restructured Canadian Welfare State on Atlantic Canada,” Social Policy and Administration 32.4 (2000): 389-400. 393. 22 Dean Beeby, “Welfare, UI don’t pay, study finds,” The Chronicle Herald Aug 10, 1994.

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cerns, which seemed to be at odds with the guaranteed representation of the minority sub-state nations. Scottish MPs had the Scottish Office but English MPs have no institutions they can appeal to in the same way.23 Devolution supporters in the North East felt this was something to which they should aspire, as one regional paper stated: “Government figures show the region losing out compared with nations and regions that already have a strong political voice of their own.”24 Peripheries are peripheral in part because they are outside of the daily experiences of elites at the centre, which can lead to feelings of neglect. It is clear that feelings of neglect existed amongst segments of the populations of the North East and Nova Scotia. As one Nova Scotia Premier stated: This is a vast country and there are many diverse conditions which need diverse responses. But Nova Scotians believe that one of the rights of Canadian citizenship is the ability to expect that generally, there will be a common level of services from coast to coast. Otherwise, we are threatened with becoming several different countries – in fact, if not in name.25

While the principle of equality of citizens and regions is prominent within the discourse, both Nova Scotia and the North East are embedded within democratic states, meaning that at some level both regions are represented in central institutions. Literature from Canada shows that regional differences were historically managed by ensuring regional representation in the federal cabinet, but this tradition faded as the focus moved away from the cabinet and towards federalprovincial bargaining.26 In Nova Scotia, though, interview respondents still felt that regional ministers acted as provincial representatives in the cabinet. In Britain, regional representation in the Cabinet may not have been a priority, depriving regions of voice. Indeed, post 1997 two Labour MPs left the government (while remaining Labour) because they felt outside the government they could act as better voices for their regions. According to Choudhry, constitutional arrangements of a state can both accommodate and integrate; accommodate by allowing regions and nations control over their interests, and integrate by giving

23

Christopher Harvie, “English Regionalism: The Dog that Never Barked,” in National Identities: The Constitution of Britain, ed. Bernard Crick (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991),105-118. 107. 24 “Cash row brings home the need for power,” The Journal, Nov 20, 2002. 25 Russell MacLellan, “National Unity: Calgary Declaration – Endorsement,” in Nova Scotia. House of Assembly. 9 June 1998, 1062, http://www.gov.ns.ca/legislature/hansard/han57-1/h98jun09.htm. 26 Herman Bakvis, Regional Ministers: Power and Influence in the Canadian Cabinet (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).

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all a voice and encouraging participation in the centre.27 It appears that in the minds of some North Eastern actors neither happens. The defence of federal intrusions in Nova Scotia can be seen in the same light as North Eastern demands for regional autonomy. North Eastern regional agitators were looking at increasing their power to ensure they had the kind of relationship with the state they wanted, regardless of how the rest of the nation was constituted, so too did actors in Nova Scotia. In both regions actors were seeking to increase their voice, yet while Nova Scotia had a legislature its actors still felt voice was lacking. Discussions in both regions appeared to be centred on the premise that for one part of the country to benefit, another had to lose out, a zero sum game. This was most clearly seen in Nova Scotia, when Premier Cameron stated “we will … be wanting the federal government to redirect some of the existing funding in Atlantic Canada to a more positive outcome.”28 Clearly he assumes that for Nova Scotia to receive more, another province must receive less. Nova Scotian Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) interviewed felt that much of the government finance structure encouraged competition between the provinces and that receiving funding through programs like ACOA (Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency) depended upon whether or not the relevant Federal Minister came from your province.29 Concern about the fairness of redistribution was evident in many aspects of Nova Scotian political debates and media accounts. Jane Purves, Minister of Education in Nova Scotia was concerned that the over-representation of academics from Newfoundland would have an impact on the direction of funds for the Atlantic Innovation Fund: “Potentially… the point of view would be tilted towards Newfoundland…”30 In the North East, some regional actors believed that there was a limited amount of money from which to draw: “A report by the Institute of Public Policy Research suggested that regional assemblies could make the current situation worse by competing for government handouts.”31 The way the report is presented, it would appear the North East Assembly would not be able to generate wealth in the region post-devolution, but merely compete for funding. This idea 27

Sujit Choudhry, “Redistribution in the Canadian Federation: The Impact of the Cities Agenda and the New Canada,” in Dilemmas of Solidarity: Rethinking Redistribution in the Canadain Federation, eds. Sujit Choudhry, Jean-Francois Gaudreault-DesBiens and Lorne Sossin (London: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 45-56. 28 Peter McLaughlin, “Premiers want more control,” Daily News, Oct 24, 1991. 29 Bill Estabrooks, Member of Legislative Assembly for Timberlea-Prospect. Interview by author, 16 August, 2006. Halifax, Nova Scotia. 30 David Jackson, “Purves nervous about N.S. share of federal fund,” The Chronicle Herald, Jun 8, 2001. 31 “Assembly ‘will not widen the divide’,” Northern Echo, Dec 16, 2002.

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is countered by Brian Hall of the Campaign for a North East Assembly who argued: An assembly would help realise that energy in terms of, for example, encouraging small business centres and firms with North East roots, taking away some of the headaches we see every month when firms with no headquarters move away.32

His arguments required an understanding of regional growth strategy, and were easily countered by those opposing regional devolution who simply stated that the devolution proposals contained no additional funding for the region. As Nova Scotia receives substantial funding from the federal government, economic success is likened to economic independence. As provincial Minister of Finance Neil LeBlanc stated concerning the position of Nova Scotia within Canada: “Comparisons to other provinces is not my main focus. My focus is how I run Nova Scotia and how we can make ourselves more independent from the federal government by governing our economy.”33 This suggests that while elites tolerate federal intrusion as outlined above, a long-term goal is to lessen dependency on federal transfers, increasing Nova Scotia’s ability to chart its own course. The above arguments indicate that actors in the North East and Nova Scotia felt the need to gain greater control over their region. In the North East control focused on government accountability and in Nova Scotia it focused on financial independence. In both regions, actors felt that they lacked the power to chart their own course within the nation, and that central government lacked either the will or capacity to properly manage regional affairs. While regional discourse was not always in favour of increased power for the region, it focused on doing what was best for the region. While the goal of economic independence (a strategy of autonomy) may seem to contradict the actions of actors in Nova Scotia who attempted to increase their voice at the centre (a strategy of integration), it must be noted that in both regions, the primary concerns of regional actors were the region’s economic performance. Regional actors appeared willing to use whatever strategies would benefit regional economies. The leaders of the three Nova Scotia provincial parties emphasised the importance of the economy in their joint submission to the Special Joint Committee on a Renewed Canada: “The principle concern of most Nova Scotians and most Canadians is without any doubt the economy.”34 A decade later, the economy 32

Ibid. Murray Brewster, “N.S. tops fed dependency list,” The Daily News, May 28, 2001. 34 Hon. Don W. Cameron, Vincent J. MacLean and Alexa McDonough, Presentation to the Special Joint Committee on a Renewed Canada (Halifax: N.P., 1992), 2. 33

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was still a major concern of Nova Scotia, with Premier Hamm stating: “Linguistic and cultural issues are not the greatest threat to the Canadian federation right now; it is the inability of the country to share the wealth from coast to coast.”35 Similarly, what draws the most attention (and ire) in the North East is the funding formula for Scotland: the Barnett Formula. The Formula works on two levels: 1) administratively, where the funding of certain territorial aspects of state administration (i.e. health care, education, transport, etc.) is divided between the constituent nations of Britain; and 2) symbolically, where it symbolises the unequal treatment of the different parts of Britain. In England, in the North East in particular, it is seen as a way for Scotland to receive greater per capita funding than it allegedly deserves. As stated in The Journal (Jan 14 2002) “Campaign for the English Regions is against unfair funding formula that benefits Scotland against the North East.” This claim highlights the fact that while constitutional issues may have been at the forefront politically, actors did not accept that constitutional issues were what mattered most to the electorate. This thread runs through discussions in the North East and Nova Scotia; constitutional discussions inevitably impact the regional economies. Interviewees in Nova Scotia indicated that their constituents did not care what level of government helped them or delivered services. Choudhry states that jurisdictional debates are irrelevant to “consumer citizens”36 who are interested not in divisions of power, but in end results. In both the North East and Nova Scotia, there is a perception amongst regional actors that neither region receives a ‘fair share’ of government expenditure;37 this section will examine how regional actors viewed (re)distribution of resources. While regional actors in both the North East and Nova Scotia attempted to ensure that their region received its fair share, institutional arrangements in the regions had an impact on the way they articulated their demands. In the North East, the debate on fairness centred on gaining a voice for the region, as lack of voice contributes directly to inequalities in the system: Scotland and Wales not only have their own democratic governments but their own Cabinet ministers to make the case for continued preferential funding arrangements and public investment. The fact that the North East has neither is one of the main reasons why, under the iniquitous Barnett Formula, public spending per head is still higher in Scotland than in this region.38

35

Jeffery Simpson, “Equalization not a welfare program,” Chronicle Herald, Nov 22, 2000. Choudhry 2006. 37 For a discussion on ‘fair’ in Canada see Donald Savoi, Visiting Grandchildren (London: University of Toronto Press, 2006). 38 “Countdown starts to vote on home rule,” The Journal, Nov 13, 2002. 36

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Devolution campaigners often spoke of the lack of accountability in the North East, yet never equated efficiency savings with accountability in Scotland.39 This, coupled with the lack of a proper needs assessment of the North East,40 highlights the emotive response evoked by money. Similarly, provincial elites in Nova Scotia used appeals to fairness in their discourse: “‘We want to make sure that federal transfers are fair to the province of Nova Scotia’ said provincial finance minister Bill Gillis.”41 Former Nova Scotia Premier John Hamm explicitly invoked the concept of fairness in his ‘Campaign for Fairness’, which received endorsement from all three parties in the provincial legislature.42 While Nova Scotian respondents felt the province was not treated fairly, one MLA pointed out that fairness is a complex issue that can turn into a discourse on all provinces being treated identically, regardless of circumstance.43 The sense of frustration felt by regional actors because of their inability to make their regional voice heard at the centre exacerbated feelings of neglect. However, it must be noted that elites in both Nova Scotia and the North East did not appeal to a separate regional identity in central-regional relations, but to a sense of fairness that would ensure that all citizens were treated equally. This state-wide identity espoused by provincial elites in Nova Scotia appears to have two key points: 1) all citizens are equal and deserving of equality of state services regardless of residence; and 2) due to the federal system in Canada, equality of citizenry is expressed in tandem with equality of provinces. In other words, all provinces should have equal access to resources to ensure that they can treat their citizens in the same manner. In quasi-federal Britain, state-wide identity was expressed in a quasi-equality of regions and nations; while North Eastern actors did not attempt to emulate the full powers of the Scottish Parliament, they nonetheless attempted to increase regional voice in the same manner, through regional devolution. In both cases, regional actors stated economic issues mattered most, yet these issues were articulated through constitutional discourse, initiated in reaction to sub-state nationalism.

39

Between 2005 and 2007 this author worked as the Parliamentary researcher for the Deputy Convenor of the Scottish Parliament Audit Committee and was able to witness both the Audit Committee and Audit Scotland hold public spending to account in Scotland. 40 Katie Schmuecker, Campaign Coordinator ‘Yes 4 The North East’, and Research Fellow, IPPR North. Interview by author, Oct 2005. 41 Chris Morris, “Provinces demand share of federal surplus,” Chronicle Herald, Feb 1, 1998, A14. 42 Nova Scotia, 2001, “All Parties Support Campaign for Fairness” http://www.gov.ns.ca/ news/details.asp?id=20010323007 (accessed August 2009). 43 Percy Paris, Member of Legislative Assembly for Waverley - Fall River - Beaver Bank. Interview by author, 3 August, 2006.

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The Sub-State Nations Sub-state nationalism is a powerful and visible force in both Canada and Britain. Yet sub-state nationalists were not the only ones to use national identity to try to force change upon the state order; the majority nations of England and Canada (outside of Quebec) did this as well. Recent research suggests that a dialectical relationship exists between the majority and minority nations within the state.44 Thus, while majority nations such as Canada (outside Quebec) and England have relationships with Quebec and Scotland as corporate entities, so do the constituent elements of the majority nations. Examining relations between the region and the sub-state nations allows one to gain an understanding of the impact of sub-state nationalism on regionalism. Within the process of identity mobilisation is the phenomenon of ‘othering.’ Othering is when a territory outside one’s own becomes very visible inside one’s own, and encourages a reaction, becoming an ‘other’ to the territory’s ‘us.’ In this sense, Scotland and Quebec can be seen as others to the North East and Nova Scotia.45 The sub-state nations’ relationship to the regions is interesting as neither Quebec nor Scotland attempt to have an influence over their neighbours. According to Stairs, nationalists in Quebec act in a self-interested manner, not concerning themselves with the impact of their demands on the rest of Canada.46 Nevertheless, Quebec and Scotland did have an impact upon their neighbours in two important ways: 1) they forced their agendas on the central government; and 2) they provided a discursive tool-kit for other regions/provinces. This section explores two ways in which the sub-state nation had an impact on regionalism. First, by challenging regional assumptions as to the nature of the state, which in turn provided models of territorial identity mobilisation. Friction between the minority and majority nation may be the result of the complex relationship that exists between them, yet this is difficult to recognise from the perspective of the individual actor. From the perspective of the individual in the majority nation, the minority sub-state nation may be seen as challenging the status quo, thus giving the regional actors the opportunity to articulate their understanding of the nature of the state. It will be shown that equality of citizens and provinces/regions underpinned the understanding of the nature of the state expressed by regional actors in both of the regions under study. 44

André Lecours and Genevieve Nootens, “Dominant Nationalism, Dominant Ethnicity: Identity, Federalism and Democracy.” Unpublished Paper 2008; Gagnon and Iavocino 2007. 45 Eva Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (London: Routledge, 1999). 46 Stairs 1997.

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The argument against special treatment was prevalent in debates in Nova Scotia vis-à-vis Quebec’s place in the Canadian constitutional order. As was seen above in Canada: A Country for All,47 Nova Scotian elites were willing to accept the uniqueness of Quebec, but were not willing to let that recognition of uniqueness become a basis for granting Quebec additional powers, a phenomenon that Mendelssohn argues is prevalent throughout Canada.48 Nova Scotian elites looked at ways of ensuring that Quebec did not receive a disproportionate amount of power. In the North East elites were very much aware of the institutional advantages made available to Scotland. This appears to have had an impact on the discourse in the North East in at least two ways. First, by creating the Scottish Parliament, Labour created an institution that is far from the thoughts of the majority of English people, but which is very visible in the North East. Second, policy diverged north and south of the border due to the Scottish Parliament’s wide-ranging legislative authority. In Nova Scotia, demands by Quebec for a radical change in the nature of the Canadian federation were seen as a challenge to the equality of citizens’ argument advanced in Nova Scotia. In the North East, special treatment for Scotland was seen as something that needed to be fought against. As Martin Callanan, North East Conservative candidate for the European Parliament and current (as of writing this chapter) MP stated: “I agree with the point that something should be done to stop the Scottish poaching jobs, but they should simply be restrained. There should be a level playing field, not more players.”49 An ‘us’ requires a ‘them’, and while Labour was creating the institutions in the North East that helped create the us, it was also reinforcing a very accessible them: Scotland. If regional actors in the North East thought of themselves as British, and Scotland is a part of Britain similar to the North East, then it follows that the North East should receive similar treatment. This is not to say that there is an outcry of public support either for a repeal of the Scottish Parliament or further devolution in England, as public opinion in England accepts asymmetrical devolution.50 This is not, however, accepted by certain elements of the political elite. Complaints within the Conservative party range from Scottish devolution being unfair to the English, to asymmetrical devolution being an inherently bad constitutional framework. Yet, there appears to be little evidence of antago47

Legislative Assembly of Nova Scotia 1991. Mathew Mendelsohn, “Four dimensions of Political Culture in Canada Outside Québec,” in Canada: The State of the Federation 2001, eds. Hamish Telford and Harvey Lazar (Kingston: Institution of Intergovernmental Relations, 2002), 51-83. 76. 49 Scott Armstrong, “Choice is all yours,” Evening Chronicle, Jan 14, 1999. 50 Trench, 7. 48

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nism towards Scottish and Welsh devolution in England,51 instead the antagonism is targeted towards special treatment or favour. Within these discussions one sees the above-mentioned problem identified by Teirney, that regional actors have a difficult time divorcing the concept of a single people within the state from their relations with the sub-state nations.52 The regional actors’ inability to interpret Canada or Britain as being constituted by multiple demos or peoples meant that regional actors advanced positions of equal citizenship throughout the state. A point that sets Nova Scotia apart from the North East, which was not anticipated to have an effect during case selection, and of which there is no parallel in the North East, is the existence of the French-Canadian community in Nova Scotia. The Acadian population, while extremely small (about 4% of the population), appear as an integral part of Nova Scotian identity, with interview respondents invoking it as part of their understanding of Nova Scotia. Former Speaker of the House of Assembly, Arthur Donahoe stated that Acadians are an important part of the province’s make up53 while the Minister for the Environment and Labour, Mark Parent, made a point of mentioning special electoral constituencies were created to ensure Acadian representation (and voice) in the House of Assembly.54 In this respect, Quebec is an important ally to the Acadians whose culture is valued by Nova Scotians. These elites see French-Canadian culture in Nova Scotia as being integral to Nova Scotian identity, and as such may be less likely to interpret Quebec as being the sole bearer of the French legacy in North America. This is not surprising, as Canadians in general see the ‘French fact’ as being integral to Canada and Canadian identity.55 Rather than allowing for greater powers to be granted to Quebec, this appears to have strengthened the equality of citizenship position across Canada. Although the actions of the sub-state nations were not always viewed favourably in the regions, they were seen as being effective at getting the voices of Scotland and Quebec heard. Therefore, it is not surprising that some regional actors believed that the region should emulate the sub-state nation. Regional campaigners in the North East not only reacted to Scotland, they attempted to emulate and learn from it. ‘Diffusion’ is a process whereby ideas from one jurisdiction permeate borders (both intellectual and physical) and are 51

John Curtice, “Public Opinion and the Future of Devolution,” in The Dynamics of Devolution: The State of the Nations 2005, ed. Alan Trench (London: Imprint Academic, 2005), 117-137. 133. 52 Tierney 2007. 53 Arthur Donahoe, Former Speaker of the Nova Scotia House of Assembly. Interview by author, 23 August, 2006. Halifax, Nova Scotia. 54 Mark Parent, Member of Legislative Assembly for Kings North, Minister of Labour and the Environment. Interview by author, 22 August, 2006. Halifax, Nova Scotia. 55 Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 263.

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taken up by other jurisdictions.56 In this respect, the experiences of the devolution lobby in Scotland became a blueprint for the devolution lobby in the North East, complete with a Constitutional Convention and a clergyman (the Bishop of Durham) to lead it. According to Don Price, the conventions joint co-ordinator: “The North East Constitutional Convention is modelled on the Scottish one.”57. Those who supported devolution expected to benefit like Scotland and Wales. According to Gill Hale, member of the (appointed) North East Assembly: “once the benefits start rolling in for Scotland and Wales, the pressure will increase further in the North East for the people here to take much more control over our own lives.”58 Not only was Scotland seen in a positive light economically, it was also seen as a progressive example for the region to follow. For example, Jane Thomas, secretary of the Campaign for the English regions stated: “[Scotland] demonstrates that where power is devolved down to inclusive democratically elected institutions, the position of women is transformed”.59 While regional elites in the North East could model their movement on a successful Scottish one, there were no substantive constitutional differences amongst Canadian provinces for Nova Scotia to aspire to. Yet there was still a desire to emulate Quebec’s ability to make its voice heard. Indeed, this was explicitly stated by Leader of the Opposition, Liberal Premier Vince MacLean: “it was impressive to see, hear and feel how committed Quebec is about what it wants for its future. Nova Scotia must begin to articulate its desires for the future with the same conviction.”60 Progressive Conservative Premier John Hamm stated nearly the same thing when he was Leader of the Opposition: The premier has got to be encouraged to stand up and speak for Nova Scotians – because if he doesn’t, who does? … I hear other premiers making statements across the country which are putting forth provincial interest. Somebody has to give the provincial interest for Nova Scotia.61

It should be noted that while Nova Scotia has the ability to use its voice, voice is something that is aspired to in the North East: 56

John O’Loughlin, Michael D. Ward, Corey L. Lofdahl, Jordin S. Cohen, David S. Brown, David Reilly, Christian S. Gleditsch and Michael Shin, “The Diffusion of Democracy, 1946-1994,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88.4 (1998): 545-574. 57 Tighe, Chris, “North-easterners hear clarion call for an assembly,” Evening Chronicle Apr 17 1999 58 “Let us shape our own lives,” The Journal, Apr 17, 1999. 59 “Devolution is women’s chance to win power,” The Journal, Mar 8, 2002. 60 Vince MacLean, “Nova Scotia must define its position – and soon!” The Chronicle Herald, March 20, 1991. 61 Quoted in Peter Hays, “‘Stand up for Nova Scotians’ Hamm urges Savage to take leading role in unity debate,” Daily News, Dec 18, 1995.

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“Next year the Scots will have their own elected parliament fighting for their interests. We have no elected body to champion the interest of the North East…” said Bill Midgley, a senior North East business figure upon joining the North East Development Agency.62

Nova Scotian elites aspired to Quebec’s willingness to use voice while North Eastern elites aspired to Scotland’s capacity for voice; in this regard voice is not merely an institutional, but rather a political capability. This is especially interesting as it is the democratic competition between Premiers and Leaders of the Opposition that encourages elites to maximise the potential for voice. Yet while the premiers are encouraged to ‘speak up’ for Nova Scotia, this discourse is bounded by a loyalty to Canada. In 1990, when the threat of Quebecois secession was high, Premier Buchanan pondered the future of Nova Scotia if Quebec separated: “There are only three alternatives… one, that the Atlantic Provinces form our own country; two, that we continue in a geographically fractured country; or three, join the United States.”63 Within days he was reaffirming his loyalty to Queen and Country in the Nova Scotia legislature: I am and always have been a fervent Nova Scotian and an ardent Canadian. I have always been and continue to be a supporter of the great federal system and parliamentary democracy under the Queen, known as Canada.64

As Nova Scotia has an elected assembly, political strategies were available to them that were not available in the North East. This is most clear in the province’s attempts to ally itself with Quebec to take advantage of Quebec’s greater political power within the federation. The editorial stance of Nova Scotia’s Chronicle Herald articulated the manner in which Nova Scotia could benefit from Quebec: While Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty is insisting that any new transfers to the provinces be done on a strictly per capita basis; Quebec Premier Jean Charest will be looking for an expansion in equalization, because Quebec would then get a bigger share of the pie. And for Mr Harper, the key to winning a majority in the next election is winning seats the Bloc Quebecois now hold. So he will be keen to make Mr Charest happy. Nova Scotia and Newfoundland must hope Mr Charest is successful in insisting that some of the new money goes into equalization.65

62

Paul Linford, “Business backs home rule plan” The Journal Sep 12, 1998. Brian Underhill, “Premier accused of treason,” Chronicle Herald, Apr 21, 1990. 64 Daily News, 20. April 1990. 65 The Chronicle Herald Opinion, “Election changed the water on the equalization beans,” May 6, 2006. 63

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The sub-state nations can be portrayed in either a positive or negative light depending on which aspect of the sub-state nation the actor chooses to highlight. For example, in the North East, anti-devolution campaigners negatively framed Scotland, portraying devolution in Scotland as a failure. The costs of the Scottish Parliament building played a prominent role in referendum literature.66 Even positive media coverage could not help but bring the costs of the Parliament building into debates. According to Brian Hall of the Campaign for the North: “An elected North East regional assembly would use existing municipal buildings in a bid to avoid a repeat of the 400 million pound Scottish Parliament ‘fiasco’”67 In the minds of many, the Scottish Parliament as a political institution became synonymous with the Scottish Parliament building. This appears to be an issue created by Britain’s lack of experience with democratic regional institutions. In Canada there are ten provincial jurisdictions, each making a multitude of decisions, and as such a (perceived) mistake made in one would not garner as much attention as the Scottish Parliament building did. As seen, the sub-state nations challenge the state framework in Britain and Canada, politicising identity not only in Canada (outside Quebec) and England, but within regional communities as well. As the regional communities are a part of the larger national communities that make up England and Canada (outside Quebec), their political options are not as great as those of the sub-state nations in that they lack the ability to advocate a ‘separatist’ agenda. Yet within their limited discursive space, regional actors are willing to emulate the sub-state nations both in their institutional capacity for voice and their willingness to use it. Furthermore, regional actors are willing to ‘ride’ alongside the sub-state nations, benefiting from their greater political clout. Conclusions and Lessons This chapter appears to substantiate arguments that during periods of heightened nationalist agitation, regional identity in the majority community can be politicised along similar lines. During such a period in Scotland and Quebec, regional actors in both Britain and Canada campaigned vigorously for their regional viewpoints. While sub-state minority nationalism and regionalism within the majority community may be unrelated, this chapter has shown how the sub-state nation has had an impact upon, and inadvertently encouraged, regional discourse. Democratic institutions played a key role in the encouragement of regionalism in the North East and Nova Scotia in a number of ways. The first section demon66 67

The Scottish Parliament building was nearly ten times over budget. “No plans to build costly assembly headquarters,” The Journal, Sep 24, 2003.

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strated how the institutional arrangements of the British and Canadian states exacerbated the peripheral nature of the two regions. While geography ensures that both regions remain peripheral, both regions lacked the institutional framework to work effectively (as defined by regional actors) on behalf of their regions, which led actors to advocate for change based on the examples provided by Scotland and Quebec. The evidence presented indicates a complex relationship between the centre and the peripheries, the regions and the sub-state nations. A better understanding of the interplay between institutions and identity in the North East and Nova Scotia was achieved by examining the nature of these relationships, as interpreted by actors in the two regions. The theme of voice was prominent in the discourse in both Nova Scotia and the North East. While the North East does not have the institutional capacity for voice that Nova Scotia has, this did not change the fact that in both regions actors felt that regional voice was lacking or ineffective. In the North East the demand was for new institutions modelled after ones in Scotland, and even though Nova Scotia’s capacity for voice is just as great (in a legal-constitutional sense) as Quebec’s, the highest ranking politicians in Nova Scotia still felt that Nova Scotia was not making its voice heard. This seems to indicate that institutional capacity is not the sole requirement for effective voice; capacity has to be combined with willingness to use it. This chapter suggests that while a sense of ‘peripheralness’ is important to regionalism, the existence of vocal sub-state nationalism will inform the way regionalism manifests itself. So what lessons can Canada and Britain learn from each other? First, institutional change does not happen in isolation. Regional elites saw the institutional changes in Scotland and Quebec, and framed their demands based on what they saw. As actors in both Nova Scotia and the North East appear to see Britain and Canada as made up of a single people, (although in Nova Scotia this single people spoke in two languages), it is difficult for actors to conceive of arrangements entailing differentiated citizenship. Secondly, institutional effectiveness is based not on institutional capacity, but political will. The Nova Scotia legislature was not seen as adequate in making Nova Scotia’s distinctive voice heard, suggesting that regional devolution in the North East would not have in of itself increased regional voice. Given that both the North East and Nova Scotia are firmly embedded in their respective nations, the ability to use voice may be constrained politically by the lack of a legitimate or convincing ‘exit’ option. This was most clearly demonstrated when the Premier of Nova Scotia publicly pondered the future of Nova Scotia if Quebec achieved independence. Finally, while regionalism may manifest itself very similarly to nationalism, they are two very distinct phenomena. Because the regions are firmly embedded 229

in their respective nations, their demands for increased voice are made in order to participate more in central decision-making; they could never seriously threaten a state with a discourse on separatism. This was especially true in Nova Scotia, where its elected legislature appears to have ‘pushed’ political debate towards integration, while the lack of such an institution in the North East appears to have allowed the debate to centre on greater autonomy from the centre, mimicking the Scottish debate. This final point seems to indicate that rather than weaken a state, mid-level government may actually increase the unity of the state by providing alternative platforms which can be used to remind the centre that peripheries are as much a part of the national community as the centre. While ‘national interest’ in Britain is decided by elites in the centre, in Canada it is established by a constant interplay between the different orders through what Simeon refers to as Federal-Provincial Diplomacy.68 This comparative study of two democratically diverse regions suggests that regional/provincial levels of government may actually strengthen the state by encouraging regional elites to adopt an integrationist approach to dealing with the centre. This is an important lesson for Canada as it acts as a reminder that as a federation Canada cannot be guided solely by majoritarian principles. For European states, especially ones that have historically been strongly unitary like Britain, France or Italy, the lesson is that mid-level government does not threaten the state.

68

Simeon 2007.

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Rediscovering Migration and Cultural Interaction in the ‘Old World’: Canadian Research Approaches Reach Europe Dirk Hoerder

The insertion of the memory of migration into Canadian history and the rediscovery of intra-European migrations in both statewide and pan-European versions of history have followed peculiar trajectories. The ‘country of immigration’-trope has, of course, always been present in Canadian public discourse, politics and historiography. However, in a state in which every person was equal before the law, not only did two rather than one particularly large ethnic groups claim special consideration as ‘nation’ (or ‘founding nation’); also, immigrants could not join either of the ‘nations’ but were slotted as ‘ethnics.’ In Europe, the migrations of Teutons and Saxons were recorded; so were the German-language (not: ‘German’) eastward migrations, as well as emigration; but thereafter – according to the master narrative – peoples had been sedentary for centuries. As long as these views prevailed, there was little ‘Europe’ might learn from ‘Canada’ – referring to the cultural-societal structures and practices that came into being only from the 1960s (Canada) or later (Europe). Of the two competing cultural elites one – or at least its Ontario and Maritimes section – was mentally focussed on Great Britain to the 1950s. The English-, Scottish-, and Irish-origin inhabitants in the West were somewhat skeptical of this colony-style transatlantic mental dependency. And many inhabitants of British Columbia, in fact, looked across the Pacific. The other elite, Quebec’s spokespersons (spokesmen would still be an empirically correct designation), was, to some degree, as enamored with France though this relationship was complex. The clerical segment of the francophones had constructed Quebec as a new, true France after what they considered the deviousness, un-Frenchness of the Commune, industrialization, and urbanization. It is a highly problematic aspect of our languages (‘mother tongues’) that names, ‘Canada’ and ‘Europe’ in our case, apply indiscriminately to very different societal formations and to shifting geographies. Temporal, historical, change is not reflected in the words we use; neither are changing institutional settings or geographical contraction and expansion. We would need proc-

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essual concepts, ‘scapes’ (Appadurai, Roberts),1 and meanings. (But this issue would merit a paper of its own.) In the 1960s, Canadian society reconceptualized membership, the meaning of citizenship, and the hierarchical scaling of cultures. The process, at first, involved Euro-Canadians but quickly came to include Asian-Canadians and African- or Afro-Caribbean Canadians. Even this new understanding of diversity, however, never fully incorporated the Aborigines. This ‘1960s+ Canada,’ as we will have to call it, captured the interest of Europeans. (And in the context of middle power status, jointly with the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, it played a role in the inter-state – rather than inter-national – political arena as a mediating, negotiating power unencumbered by self-interest, in distinction to the U.S. and other great/ former colonizer powers). From this time, the newly developed, highly differentiated concept of cultural interaction began to travel. Its travel was, to some degree, assisted migration. The Cultural and Academic Affairs Section of the Department of External Affairs (a better name than the later designation ‘Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade’) generously supported those who would carry the concept to other societies as well as those (Canadian Studies associations) who would want to include the study of multiculturalism into its agenda. ‘Multiculturalism’ became an important export item in the balance of recognition. Migrants who move to new societies are not necessarily welcome. While in Europe’s dynastic states cultural groups of in-migrants could negotiate their status with the ruler and remain different as long as they swore allegiance to the sovereign – they were equal only in subject status, civic status was characterized by diversity – the nation-state ideology demanded assimilation to the nation (and demanded that the in-migrants have the proper genes, blood, race, or whatever). Nations were constructed as culturally homogenous, minorities (a new term) and ethnics were of lower status – in direct contradiction to the post-Age of Revolution concept of citizens equal before the law. ‘Nation-state’ was and is a contradiction in terms. Thus, from the late 19th century on, migrants of different cultures did no longer find comparatively easy negotiable access to polities in the process of changing from dynastic to republican rule. When multicultural concepts began to travel from Canada outward, they, too, had to find entry-gates. The approach was subversive of monoculturalism and national homogeneity as then still conceived by the keepers of the gates. The concept might empower ‘Blacks’ in Great Britain, ‘Turks’ in Germany, or ‘Maghreb’ people in France. It seems to me that the British, German, and French self-defined ‘nationals’ must 1

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimension of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Allan F. Roberts, “La ‘Géographie Processuelle’: Un nouveau paradigme pour les aires culturelles,” Lendemains 31.122/123 (2006): 41-61.

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have had misgivings about the validity of their respective culture, must have considered it brittle, if the small number of newcomers of a different culture would pose a threat to allegedly ancient national identities. How did a society like Canada develop the concept? What conjuncture was necessary in European societies that made entry possible? The Development of Multicultural Practices and Policies in Canada Compared to most, perhaps all European societies, Canadian society had an advantage that, however, most French- and English-language intellectuals and policy-makers saw as a weakness.2 Canadian society – and the term should for empirical accuracy always be a plural – incorporated two cultures that competed for ‘founding’ or ‘nation’ status. It incorporated five or more regions – the Maritimes, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies, British Columbia, and, I would add as number six, a North not settled by Euro-Canadians. The British-origin Canadians, rather than being one founding or whatever nation, were English, Scots, Irish, as well as a few Welsh and others. Scots and Irish were aware of their cultural differences compared to the English. The French-speakers seemed to be more homogenous under the tutelage or domination of the Church, but more than half a million of them left this self-styled founding nation, formerly called ‘New France,’ to find jobs in what is still being called ‘New England.’ Thirdly, there were the other immigrants, labeled ‘ethnic groups.’ In the 1960s-debates about a Canadian ‘identity’ this multiplicity – worse than duplicity – was decried by many. The detractors were not even fully aware of the achievements and internal complexity of the ‘ethnics,’ some of whom, in their own languages of origin, had published both group histories and literary texts (Appendix 1). The ‘elite’ gatekeepers were language-challenged, as this would be expressed today, but did not know this. (It would be interesting to speculate, whether the elites did know but did not admit the limitations of monolingualism to themselves as a FrenchAfrican literary aphorism, the source of which I am unable to locate, has it: “elle sait, sans le savoir, ce qu'elle ne savait pas encore.”) Intellectual life in Canada reflected some of this diversity. English-language McGill University became, to a certain degree, an institution of exchange between French- and English-language scholarships. The margins of society talked to the center and the center was aware of its marginality towards the United 2

Switzerland and Belgium (founded only in 1830) had an awareness of multiple peoples in one state, while the label ‘British’ hid the plurality of peoples in the polity and the label ‘French’ hid both the military annihilation of the distinct southern Occitan culture and the continued presence of ‘minorities’ like the Basques, Bretons, Corsicans, and Alsatians.

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States: Harold Innis’s recognition of the U.S.-Canada hierarchy in the economic sphere and in communication, Maurice Careless’s concept of metropolitan centers and surrounding hinterlands, W.L. Morton’s Winnipeg-based thoughts on Canadian identity, to name only some voices. No mind-numbing national homogeneity could ever be imposed on or take hold of Canadian society as a whole. These “limited identities” (Careless), contrary to the fears of fragmentation, provided the foundation of the 1960s+ acceptance of diversity.3 Diversity by gender, class, culture, and color inspired the exuberant mood of large segments of 1960s Canadian societies. A decisive role in translating this mood into policy-making advice was assumed by the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. When many young reformers, scholars in the making, in European institutions of higher learning introduced the category of class, the Canadian colleagues introduced the category of ethnicity, briefly in a bi-, then in a multi-cultural version. The mood for change was bipartisan. The Progressive-Conservative government changed the socio-political terms of reference with the Bill for the Recognition and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 1960. To circumscribe the frame for an ‘equal partnership’ of the presumed duality, the subsequent Liberal government established the B and B Commission. When the third force, the ‘ethnics,’ with the institutionally well-organized Ukrainian-Canadian ethno-cultural group at the forefront, challenged the self-centered two ‘founding nations’ and demanded inclusion, the Commission agreed to deal with all citizens whatever their cultural origins. Shortly after its Report, the Official Languages Act of 1969 made Canada a bilingual country, if on the Federal level only; and, in 1971, the bi-cultural Trudeau government proclaimed the policy of multiculturalism. This policy and public political culture incorporated, from the 1970s, the large-volume inmigration from several Asian cultures, the Caribbean societies, and of Latin American political refugees. Some criticism and adjustments notwithstanding, the transition of Canadian society from contests about ‘identity’ to agreement about ‘identifications’ had been smooth. Before turning to the European gates and societies of arrival, the concept of multiculturalism needs to be recapitulated. As with the names of the polities, discussed above, the name/term/label ‘multiculturalism’ does not reflect the project’s complexity. It was not meant as accepting of a ‘mosaic’ with pieces cemented into place. It was intended as a relational, dynamic, and integrative course rather than as a state of affairs. The policy on “multiculturalism in a bilingual framework” emphasized processes of integration and cultural communication: (1) support for those cultural groups “that have demonstrated a desire and 3

J.M.S. Careless, “‘Limited Identities’ in Canada,” in Contemporary Approaches to Canadian History, ed. Carl Berger (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1987), 5-12.

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effort to continue to develop, a capacity to grow and contribute to Canada;” (2) measures to “assist members of all cultural groups to overcome cultural barriers to full participation in Canadian society;” (3) programs to “promote creative encounters and interchange among all Canadian cultural groups in the interests of national unity;” and, (4) programs to “assist immigrants to acquire at least one of Canada’s official languages.” The terminology was soon being changed from “immigrants” and “ethnics” to “newcomers” and “coming Canadians.”4 The frame for the policy was recognition of each and every individual’s human rights in the triple meaning of political enfranchisement and equality (first generation of human rights), material and social security (second generation of human rights), and right to cultural expression and development (third generation of human rights). The resulting scholarship involved philosophers (Will Kymlicka), sociologists (Jean Burnet – coordinator of the research for the B and B Commission, Danielle Juteau, Wsevolod Isajiw), historians (Howard Palmer, Robert Harney, Franca Iacovetta), literary historians (Tamara Palmer, later Palmer-Seiler), geographers (John Warkentin), political economists (Daniel Drache), and in each field numerous others. This interdisciplinarity gave Canadian Studies as Area Studies a decided advantage over American Studies which, in a kind of intellectual ethnic succession, had provided the previous generation of travelling concepts but which remained limited to history and literary analysis and thus cultural rather than societal.5 4

5

Announcement of Implementation of Policy of Multiculturalism within Bilingual Framework. Canada. Parliament, House of Commons. Debates, 8 Oct. 1971, 8545-48, 8580-85. Before this Canada-Europe connection, concepts had traveled from the United States. Again the migration analogy is apt: In the 1950s, such concepts provided more openness, less hierarchy, more flexibility, better food for thought than many German or other European nation-state bounded scholarly discourses. These concepts, American Studies and Democratic Theory most prominently, did not need pre-paid ticket. They were sent, sometimes even pushed, by the donor. In many Europeans’ opinions, the U.S. were both liberator and big brother. In Canada, which received its share of U.S. scholarly input, the CARE packages were needed. The state’s British-centered elites and, in a different way, Quebec’s French-centered elites, had neglected the development of academic training to a degree that the reorientation of the graduate education from reliance on British, French, and U.S. institutions to Canadian ones required the hiring of personnel from abroad. In political science, in a context widespread in the Atlantic world and beyond, the U.S. political system was considered the model of democracy. Thus, it took no imperialist attitude for U.S.-origin faculty in Canada to rely on U.S. texts. When Canadian scholars realized that some or many of their U.S. guestworker colleagues were better paid then they were, formed ethnic enclaves, and knew little and taught less about Canada, they rebelled. Others had continued to advocate a Canadian-inspired political science inclusive of political economy. Robin Mathews and James Steele, eds., The Struggle for Canadian Universities: A Dossier (Toronto: New Press, 1969); Jan J. Loubser, Canadianization of the Social Sciences (Ottawa: SSFC-FCSS, 1978); Anthony H. Richmond, The Employment of Foreign Academics in Canada. A Report to the Royal Society of Canada (York, Canada: Royal Society of Can-

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Entering Europe: Conjunctures of Societal and Academic Developments European societies did not provide wide-open entry-gates for Canadian concepts: the public discourses about ‘Blacks,’ ‘Turks,’ and ‘Maghrebinians’ explicitly rejected cultural pluralism, ascribed positions to the migrants, and excluded relations and negotiations based on equality of cultures. However, a number of factors made for a complex ‘climate of opinion’ or Zeitgeist. Two major migrations, the reverse, return, and refugee migrations under decolonization as well as the ‘guest’ worker south-north migrations changed population composition and cultural practices. The working guests, like all guests, were expected to leave after a certain time – as mandated by the old concept of rotatory foreign labor applied in Germany’s Second Reich as regards Polish-culture workers. In contrast to policymakers’ ukases, many of the men and women of the decolonization and labor migrations assumed control over their own lives and decided to stay. European societies became de facto many-cultured, but public memory – socialized in nation-state run education systems – remained monocultural, national. It might be argued that this juxtaposition already revealed a weakness of the nationals’ self-defined superiority: the hierarchy designated in-migrants as inferior because they came from the margins and did not fully know the ways of the metropolitan core. However, the migrants could move in (segments of) two societies, a distinct advantage over those stuck in monocultural ways. Did the migrants have higher social capital than the residents? The incongruity of master narrative, public memory, and official statewide policies (or the total absence of the latter) was most evident on the level of municipalities, where teachers, social workers, and politicians had to deal with the issue of different cultures. In consequence, on this level, a search for alternative concepts and methods began. ‘Canada’ became known for solving issues that were not being addressed by national governments in Europe. Aware of this interest, the Canadian Multiculturalism Directorate sent a delegation to German cities for a mutual learning experience, as it was diplomatically called. In the ‘Deutsch-Kanadisches Seminar über Multikulturalismus’ (which in Hamburg, March 1996, I moderated) the visitors learnt of local initiatives and in turn inserted their Canadian experiences. On the level of scholarship parallel and unrelated developments in different European countries provided openings for traveling Canadian concepts and a reconceptualization of monoculturalist stances. The introduction of class and class cultures was followed by the addition of gender and gendered cultures and, ada, 1983); Daniel Drache, “Rediscovering Canadian Political Economy,” Journal Canadian Studies 11.3 (1976): 3-18.

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in the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, by the addition of youth cultures (or, from a more traditional perspective: ‘sub-’cultures). Thus, the alleged homogeneity had been dissolved and the master narrative stood before its believers like the fable’s emperor with new closes before his subjects. To stretch the image, in the fable it was an innocent child that pointed to the emperor’s nakedness; in the 1960s and 1970s it was less than innocent students and young scholars. Europe’s state and cultural apparatuses began to experience what, for a different age of change, Tocqueville had called the defection of the elites from the ancien régime, at least of the future-oriented segment of them. I will outline my own, specific case of reconceptualization, exemplary in some ways. In the late 1970s, I began to study the North American working class in the later 19th and early 20th century. From my outside (and Euro-centric) perspective, it was immediately obvious (augen-fällig) that in North America class could not be studied without ethnicity and, as women scholars pointed out to me, without gender. U.S. labor or working-class history was restricted to monocultural research because most scholars did not read or speak any of the immigrants’ languages. ‘No problem,’ they said, because immigrants were uprooted and would (have to) assimilate. Refusing to recognize that migrants came as fully socialized individuals most assumed a ‘cultural baggage’ which could easily be left at Ellis Island or deposited somewhere else. To counter such monolingual, monocultural, and self-serving attitudes, I organized the Labor Migration Project (funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and Stiftung Volkswagenwerk) to bring together cooperating scholars from some forty migrants’ cultures – rather than states – of origin.6 The project intended to provide the foundations for a comparative culture-based study of the North American (no longer: U.S.) anglo- and franco-phone many-cultured working classes.7 From the emerging braided perspective, the nation-to-ethnic enclave paradigm, the migration historians’ master narrative, collapsed and a concept of migration in the Atlantic economies with non-linear migrations in stages, return and multiple migrations emerged. The simple pooling of knowledges – a travel from many origins to one research destination – made evident that men and women in Europe’s many societies had been on the move through the centuries, the era of the nation-states included, since such ‘national economies’ at times did not provide jobs for sustainable lives. Mobility might be compared to Canada and the U.S. as long as the contexts remain differentiated. The study of migrant ‘nationals’ to an imaginary ‘America’ raised questions. In the late 19th/ early 20th cen6

I could not recruit cooperating scholars in the post-fascist Iberian societies and in the Stalinist Czech, Slovak, Baltic, and Russian societies. Emigrant scholars dealt with these cultures. 7 The intended inclusion of Spanish-language intra-Americas migrants and Asian-origin arrivals was not possible because of funding constraints.

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tury, the ‘Italians’ who migrated came from many regional cultures with mutually not understandable dialects. A European core, consisting of Britain, France, Hohenzollern Germany, the Benelux, Switzerland, and the German and Czech sections of the Habsburg monarchy, was as much a labor importing region as North America, and potential migrants on the peripheries could choose between local migrations, intra-European ones, or transatlantic destinations. Europe’s history was a culturally interactive one. For this and other projects, the concept of multicultural societies provided a better frame for interpretation and, thus, contacts to Canadian scholars became desirable. The conjuncture of developments – labor migrations, decolonization, new approaches in academia – resulted in a new, intensive awareness of manyculturedness in the present. This then led to a re-view of the past: cultural interaction became visible to a degree that the question arose why scholars had not seen it (unless we assume that they knowingly suppressed what they saw and knew). The conditions for the re-view differed: Voices that could not have been silenced in Canada had been silenced in Europe where the layers of nationhood discourses were thicker and more difficult to pierce. Thus the first histories of European societies inclusive of migrants, another independent development in the academia of the time, appeared only from the mid-1980s on (see Appendix 2). The most important impetus to changed discourses on all levels of societies probably was the sizeable in-migration to all European states. The most important achievement for societies in general and academia was a new multiperspectivity. Reconceptualizing Histories and Theories in an Atlantic Context At the end of the 1990s, when a burgeoning scholarship had produced a wide variety of approaches,8 the European Network for Canadian Studies initiated a major symposium to translate the reconceptualization of Canadian history into a new approach to European history. ‘Recasting European and Canadian History: National Consciousness, Migration, Multicultural Lives,’ organized by Christiane Harzig (U Bremen), Dirk Hoerder (U Bremen), Danielle Juteau (U Mont8

A further conjuncture, external to these developments, was the decision of the U.S. government to reduce its cultural presence abroad and, parallel, the Canadian government’s decision to increase cultural presence abroad. The critique of the superpowers had left its impact and an interest in middle powers in a conflict-laden global arena was growing. Canadian Studies, marginal before, came and were there to stay. Dirk Hoerder, To Know Our Many Selves Changing Across Times and Space (Augsburg: Wissner, 2005), 247-264.

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real), and Adrian Shubert (York U), in May 2000 brought together scholars from different fields and perspectives who provided new reading(s) of the past. As to the data on cultural interaction: ‘Europe,’ in its early, Mediterranean version stretched from the interfaith convivencia of Moors, Jews, and Christians in the 9th- to 12th-century Iberian peninsula via the cities of Urban Italy with their connections to Arabia and Asia to the Ottoman Empire with its millet system of ethno-cultural groups’ self-administration. In the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg lands, ethnic and religious groups interacted, competed, overlapped until national movements began to impose their cultural hierarchization on the balance of the imperial structures. Europe’s history, like Canada’s was played out in different geographies: the notion of Europe’s social spaces changed over time. While segments of the future Canada had been part of the British and French political empires with a Spanish and Russian presence on the Pacific coast and the involvement of globally active business empires like the Hudson’s Bay and East India companies, integral to Europe’s history but varying in impact over time were the Black Atlantic, the Chinese and other Asian diasporas, as well as the global – ‘glocal’ – spread of Italian and Polish working-class (or, more cautiously: laboring) diasporas. Europe’s history was as many-cultured as Canada’s. The data faced master narratives as deeply and uselessly entrenched as soldiers in the nation-state- and empire-driven World War One, but its empirical validity sapped the exhausted national stories. The outside perspective of scholars of Canada, of the pluralist Ottoman Empire, and of the Iberian interfaith societies revealed a Europe different from the conglomerate of inside perspectives from particular European nations.9 As to knowledge production in national historiography and ‘Area Studies’: measuring and accounting sciences (Kameralwissenschaften) had provided dynastic treasuries with information about the taxability of their subjects even in regions distant from the capital; mariners’ knowledge acquisition about littorals, trading circuits, and goods produced afar (sometimes called ‘exotic’) expanded the states’ reach; next, colonial studies provided an underpinning for rule over conquered peoples (Herrschaftswissenschaften); area or country studies helped understand or label intra-European competitors, neighbors, or enemies. In the early phase of expansion, when European newcomers’ presence was as weak in ports of Asia as in the first settlements in the St. Lawrence valley, they negotiated with resident peoples and acquired knowledge from them. The increasing number, arms, and power of Europeans brought intercultural learning to its 9

Essays by Norbert Rehrmann, Fikret Adanir, Michael John, Paul E. Lovejoy, Peter S. Li, Adam Walaszek, in The Historical Practice of Diversity: Transcultural Interactions from the Early Modern Mediterranean to the Postcolonial World, ed. Dirk Hoerder, Christiane Harzig and Adrian Shubert (New York: Berghahn, 2003).

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end. Thus, Europe’s alleged freeway to modernity, the formation of ‘nationstates’ was not a self-contained development, but was inextricably related to colonization and racialization of peoples outside of Europe. In the 20th century, Europeans’ interest-driven versions of knowledges were questioned by students from South Asia coming to universities in Britain (M. Gandhi, J. Nehru, B.R. Ambedkar, and many others) and from West and North Africa to universities in France (L. Senghor, A. Césaire). ‘French’ scholars who had been born in the colonies (F. Fanon), had spent part of their lives there (P. Bourdieu), or had taught French in non-French societies (R. Barthes), by their physical dis- or replacement, came to live dual or multiple perspectives and, traveling back to the center, re-placed monocultural foundational stories by the multiperspectivity of discourse theory.10 While, in Canada, British-origin inhabitants of the Prairie hinterlands had engaged Ontarian intellectuals in conversations about Britishness, the English- or French-speaking inhabitants of India or North Africa, from their subalternized and racialized positions, had not been able to engage the colonizers before the 1930s.11 In Canada, the limitations of official narratives had been laid bare when, in 1913, Alberta’s government prohibited education in immigrant languages: “The minister of education lies when he says that Alberta is an English province. Alberta is a Canadian province, where everyone has equal rights,” commented the Ukrainian newspaper Novyny.12 As to inclusion and exclusion: The exclusion of ‘ethnics’ in Canada paralleled the exclusion of ‘minorities’ in Europe and scholarship in Canada and Europe developed parallel. The Ukrainians and others’ search for belonging in Canada paralleled that of Jews and minorities in Europe. Whiteness and cleanliness, proletarian culture and female gender, were in- or excluding categories on both sides of the Atlantic.13 While migration historians and students of racial hierarchizations have come to understand the exclusionary aspects of citizenship 10

The colonized Native Peoples in Canada, as subalterns of different language, could not talk back in a way audible to the colonizers. Their input into recasting Canadian history came later. 11 Bernd-Peter Lange and Mala Pandurang, “Dialectics of Empire and Complexities of Culture: British Men in India, Indian Experiences of Britain,” in Hoerder, Harzig and Shubert eds. 2003, 177-203; Dirk Hoerder, “The Long History of Area/Country Studies: Canadian Studies as Model or Special Case of Societal Studies,” in Au-delà des Area Studies: Perspectives comparatistes et interculturelles, éd. Laurence McFalls et Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, Lendemains 122/123 (2006): 6276. 12 Quoted in William A. Czumer, Recollections about the Life of the First Ukrainian Settlers in Canada, transl. Louis T. Laychuck. First published Ukrainian orig. Edmonton, 1942; (Edmonton: Canadian Inst. Ukrainian Stud., 1981), 106-10, 118-19. 13 Essays by Hoerder, Albert Lichtblau, Vic Satzewich, Sylvia Hahn, Adele Perry, and Franca Iacovetta, in Negotiating Nations: Exclusions, Networks, Inclusions / Nations en transition: exclusions, réseaux, inclusions, ed. Christiane Harzig, Dirk Hoerder, Adrian Shubert, Special Issue of Histoire sociale – Social History 33.66 (2000).

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and while political scientists and philosophers in Canada began to revise conceptualizations of nation and state, European political and nation-state historians are still laboring to come to terms with many-cultured peoples within state borders.14 Citizenship in Europe is changing, if slowly, from an “ethnocratic” to a “democratic” version (Harzig), citizenship in Canada was “place-sensitive” (Jensen) rather than state-imposed and essentialist and thus flexible and malleable responding both to regional specifics and to changes over time.15 Towards a new political theory: On the basis both of the recognition of diversity in history and in view of present debates about social and political cohesion based on the equality of all members of a polity, whether Canadian or European, only a new theory and practice of “democratic institutional pluralism” (Veit Bader) in a “moderately, rather than a radically, secular state” (Tariq Modood) is able to recognize and integrate pluralities of groups.16 Both scholars argue that postulated institutional “difference-blind neutrality […] tend[s] to 14

The European Science Foundation, Programme in Humanities, funds from 2003 – 2008 the program ‘Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Europe’ with the following goal. http://www.esf.org/activities/research-networking-programmes/humanities-sch/current-esfresearch-networking-programmes-in-humanities/representations-of-the-past-the-writing-ofnational-histories-in-europe.html (accessed March 2007): “National history is central to national identity. A sustained and systematic study of the construction, erosion and reconstruction of national histories across a wide variety of European states is a highly topical and extremely relevant exercise for two reasons: firstly, because of the long and successful history of the national paradigm in history-writing; and, secondly, because of its re-emergence as a powerful political tool in the 1990s in the context of the accelerating processes of Europeanisation and globalisation. National histories form an important part of the collective memory of the peoples of Europe. National bonds have been, and continue to be, among the strongest bonds of loyalty. A genuinely transnational and comparative investigation into the structures and workings of national histories will play an important part both in understanding the diversity of national histories in Europe and preparing the way for further dialogue and understanding among European nation-states. The project will bring together the histories of Western and Eastern Europe in a concerted attempt to bridge the historiographical divide fostered by the Cold War division of the continent. Methodologically, the project unites cultural transfer and comparative approaches, which are the most appropriate means for exploring the complex relationship between national historiographies and national historical cultures in Europe. The last decade has witnessed an acceleration of projects involving comparative and cultural transfer approaches. Now is the time to bring those diverse attempts together in a Europe-wide research programme.” Others have long been researching Europe’s many-cultured history. 15 Christiane Harzig, “From State Construction to Individual Opportunities: The Historical Development of Citizenship in Europe,” in Hoerder, Harzig and Shubert eds. 2003, 203-220; Jane Jenson, “Place-Sensitive Citizenship: The Canadian Citizenship Regime until 1945,” in Hoerder, Harzig and Shubert eds. 2003, 221-238; Yvonne M. Hébert, ed., Citizenship in Transformation in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). 16 Veit Bader, “Democratic Institutional Pluralism and Cultural Diversity”, in The Social Construction of Diversity: Recasting the Master Narrative of Industrial Nations, ed. Christiane Harzig, Danielle Juteau, Irina Schmitt (New York: Berghahn, 2003), 131-167; Tariq Modood, “Multiculturalism, Secularism, and the State” in Harzig, Juteau and Schmitt eds., 2003, 168-185.

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stabilize existing structural (economic, social, political) and cultural or symbolic inequalities between majorities and minorities.”17 Institutional pluralism – ideally as ‘associative democracy’ – is able “to find productive balances between the collective autonomy of minorities and individual autonomy [; … for individuals it] develops real exit options (not only exit rights) and is based on overlapping and crosscutting membership in many associations.”18 Multicultural situations in the Atlantic World are not merely, as migration historians and sociologists have argued, ethno-cultural phenomena but also involve a “new plurality of faiths.”19 “Politics of recognition” need to dissolve “the institutional separation between private faith and public authority” because “a strict public/ private distinction may simply act to buttress the privileged position of historically ‘integrated’ folk cultures at the expense of historically subordinated or newly migrated folk.”20 This theoretization is far more broadly applicable than Kymlicka’s Canada-centered approach or Habermas’s turn of critical theory towards “constitutional patriotism.”21 To summarize: Researchers in Europe and Canada began with contacts, moved to a reception of Canadian experiences and concepts, and created an integrated field of theoretical debate and empirical research. Contacts and traveling concepts led to a many-cultured research-scape with a new cohesion. This multiperspectivity stands in explicit contrast to Samuel Huntington’s armageddonparadigm and to his mentally terrorist vision that migrants need to dream in the language of the receiving society in order to be granted inclusion.22 Delayed Travels – New Directions Having discussed the intensive exchanges between Canadian and the many European approaches since the 1970s, and in particular in the last decade, it needs to be pointed out that empirical analyses and theoretizations of conceptualizing diversity had been available on the marketplace of scholarship and 17

Bader 2003, 131. Ibid. 132, 156. 19 Modood 2003, 168. 20 Ibid. 170. 21 Kymlicka conceded his Canada-centeredness at a conference on citizenship in Ottawa, 1997, after an extended sabbatical in Europe had brought him into contact with European theoretizations. Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) and Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship. A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 22 Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997) and Samuel Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). 18

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ideas long before but that scholars boycotted them. In three many-cultured societies of the Americas – Canada included, scholars began to analyze social interaction in terms of many cultures and of métissage from the 1940s. All three were former colonies with culturally stratified populations and remnants of mental dependency on the European colonizer cultures, once called mother countries or fatherlands. In Canada, sociologists Everett Hughes and Helen MacGill Hughes noted from the empirical data that societies do not provide one single model of assimilation or acculturation. In Brazil, Gilberto Freyre studied the interaction of the worlds the slaves made and the worlds the plantation owners made. While the power hierarchy was evident, lives and cultures were nevertheless inextricably entwined. In Afro-Euro-Asian Cuban society, Fernando Ortiz developed an analysis of transculturation.23 Diversity, these analyses made clear, provided options and might provide comparative advantage. Since the three academic worlds were on the margins of the Euro-U.S. core of knowledge production, few took notice though Freyre’s and Ortiz’s studies were translated into English. Free trade in ideas was not welcome. Within the U.S., observers – societally marginalized as women and pacifist – were also aware of the mixing of populations: Jane Addams and other social workers and intellectuals of the Chicago Settlement House in the 1890s24 as well as the pacifist Randolph Bourne who, at the time of ‘melting pot’ rhetoric, had commented “America is coming to be, not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors.”25 Concepts travel in the context of power structures and domineering discourses – and, when not even permitted to sit in the back of the bus, they cannot arrive. If historians’ traditional invented national narratives and exclusions (Hobsbawn/Ranger, Torpey)26 and political scientists’ nation-state paradigm is not supported by the data, a new approach is mandated. Canada’s data of population 23

In Mexico, José Vasconcelos’s concept of a cosmic race, raza cosmica, while based on a rhetoric of métissage of Europeans, Amerindians, Africans, and Asians, was a racializing positioning meant to place the Spanish-speaking Mexican mestizo (with little empirical acknowledgement of the nonEuropean contributions) above the U.S. Anglo. Vasconcelos, José (1881-1959), The Cosmic Race. Bilingual Edition, trans. Didier T. Jaén (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1997) -- 1st Spanish ed., Raza cósmica (1925); prev. publ.: The Cosmic Race. Raza cósmica (Los Angeles: California State University, Dept. of Chicano Studies, 1979). 24 Jane Addams et al., Hull-House Maps and Papers [“Chicago Survey”]. A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago together with comments and essays on problems growing out of the social conditions, by Residents of Hull House (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1895; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1970). 25 Randolph S. Bourne, “Trans-National America,” Atlantic Monthly 118 (1916): 86-97. 26 Eric J. Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport. Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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composition across its history and the fiat that, at a particular conjuncture, established the state are a far more plausible starting point for a theory of political systems and an analysis of diversity than the mis-interpretation of Great Britain and France as models. To go further back in history, the Ottoman Empire at its apogee or the port cities of South and Southeast Asia provide examples of states’ historic institutional pluralism and evolution. Diversity was and is not a Canadian affair but was generic to state formation. Negotiating diversity has been a characteristic of many societies in the past. In the present, rather than following the catchword of “transnationalism,” which contradicts migrants’ and residents’ regional identifications, I would suggest an approach that I call ‘Transcultural Societal Studies’ and that emerged out of my reading of the Study of Canada in its many variants since the 1840s. The broad transdisciplinary agenda, comprehensive as to class, race/ ethnicity, and gender, would combine the discursive sciences (i.e. the humanities) and the social sciences, i.e. the study of state institutions, societal structures, and (family) economics, the life and environmental sciences, and the normative sciences, i.e. the study of law, religion and ethics. Transcultural Societal Studies capture the diversity of human lives and the diversity in each and every human being’s life in the frame of institutions and power hierarchies. Transcultural Societal Studies reach out globally to the diversity of origins of the some 180 different cultural groups in Toronto, Frankfurt, London, Moscow, or other as well as to Amerindian and other Aboriginal cultures across the globe not counted in this figure. They study relations, interactions, and networks rather than essentializing or even geneticizing identities and social slots of ethnicities, classes, or genders. They approach peoples’ lives and their roles in creating ever new societies. Diversity of cultures and interactive negotiation permits options, creative energies, and development. Individuals capable of combining multiple cultural capabilities increase their individual and their social capital and thus add to the assets available in society as a whole.

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Appendix 1 Major Publications in Ethnic Languages Predating Studies in the Official Languages 1925+ Jews Rhinewine, Abraham, Der Yid in Kanada, 2 vols. (Toronto: Farlag Kanada, 1925, 1927) Sack, Benjamin Gutelius, Geshikhte fun Yidn in Kanade: fun di friste unheybn bis der letster tsayt (Montreal, 1948), as History of the Jews in Canada, transl. from the Yiddish by R. Novek, Montreal: Harvest House, 1965) 1928+ Magyars Paizs, Ödön, Magyarok Kanadában. Egy most készülö országról (Budapest: Athenaeum, 1928) A Kanadai Magyarság Története (Toronto, Ont., 1940) 1944 Doukhobors Sukhorev, V. A., Istoriya Dukhobotsev (Grand Forks, B.C., 1944) 1947 Poles Zubrzycki, B. J., Polacy w Kanadzie (1759-1946) (Toronto: Kongres Polonji Kanadyskiej, 1947) 1952 Russians Okulevich, G., Russkie v Kanade (Toronto: Federatsii Russkikh Kanadtsev, 1952) 1955 Italians Vangelisti, Guglielmo, Gli Italiani in Canada (first ed., Italy, 1955; second rev. and enlarged ed., Montreal: Chiesa italiana di N. S. della Difesa, 1958)

Appendix 2 Early Statewide Studies on Multicultural Pasts in Europe Great Britain and Ireland Lunn, Kenneth, ed., Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities (Folkestone: Dawson, 1980). Holmes, Colin, John Bull's Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871-1971 (London: Macmillan, 1988). France Green, Nancy L., “’Filling the Void’: Immigration to France before World War I,” in Dirk Hoerder, ed., Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies. The European and North American Working Classes During the Period of Industrialization (Westport, Ct., 1985), 143-61. Lequin, Yves, ed., La mosaïque France: histoire des étrangers et de l'immigration (Paris: Larousse, 1988), rev. under the title Histoire des étrangers et de l'immigration en France (Paris: Larousse, 1992).

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Noiriel, Gérard, Le Creuset français. Histoire de l'immigration XIXe-XXe siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1988), Engl. transl. by Geoffroy de Laforcade, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1996). Bautier, Robert-Henri, in Jacques Dupâquier et al., Histoire de la population française, vol. 1: “Des origines à la Renaissance” (Paris, 1988), 123-70, quote p. 123-24: Les éléments constitutifs de la Nation française (ou plutôt des populations qui vivent aujourd'hui dans le cadre de nos frontières) sont d’abord les Gallo-Romains (euxmêmes représentant un substrat ethnique complexe), qui demeurent l’élément fondamental, surtout au sud de la Seine et en Aquitaine, mais leur régression démographique au cours du Bas-Empire semble évidente. S’y joignirent les “immigrés”, principalement germaniques (Franks, Alamans, Burgondes, Goths), les Bretons venus des îles celtiques, les Gascons de la région pyrénéenne, en attendant les Normands sortis de Scandinavie. Le tout s’est trouvé complété par des éléments juifs, par quelques Syriens et Grecs, et par des groupes isolés ou des individus venus de Saxe, d’Espagne, d’Irlande. Le sentiment particulariste des “régions” est né de ces composants, et contribua à donner naissance, d’abord, aux royaumes du haut Moyen Age--Austrasie, Neustrie, Bourgogne, Aquitaine (composite et colonisée) et Bretagne--, puis, par la suite, aux “duchés” ou aux “marches” du Moyen Age classique: duchés de “France”, de Bourgogne, de Normandie, d`Aquitaine, de Gascogne, de Bretagne, comté de Flandre, les deux “Lorraines”, la Provence et la marche d’Espagne ou Catalogne. Les habitants de chacun des ces territoires s’habituèrent à vivre ensemble, à combattre sous les mêmes bannières, à connaître les mêmes “coutumes”, à parler la même langue ou le même dialecte. Sauf exception (les Alamans en Alsace, les Francs dans le pays du Rhin, de la Moselle et de l’Escaut, les Bretons en Armorique), l’immigration ne fut pas suffisante pour modifier profondément l’ethnie de la Gaule, d'autant que l’acculturation des nouveaux venus fut rapide; ses conséquences se firent surtout sentir sur le plan politique et social. Netherlands Lucassen, Jan, and Rinus Penninx, Nieuwkomers, Immigranten en hun nakomelingen in Nederland, 1550-1985 (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1985). Engl.: Newcomers. Immigrants and Their Descendants in the Netherlands 1550-1995 (rev. ed., Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1997). Belgium Morelli, Anne, ed., Histoire des étrangers et de l'immigration en Belgique de la préhistoire à nos jours (Brussels: EVO/Centre Bruxellois d'Action Interculturelle, 1992.) Germany Bade, Klaus J., ed., Deutsche im Ausland. Fremde in Deutschland. Migration in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Munich: Beck, 1992). Austria-Hungary Fassmann, Heinz, “A Survey of Patterns and Structures of Migration in Austria, 18501900,” in Dirk Hoerder, ed., Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies. The Euro-

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pean and North American Working Classes During the Period of Industrialization (Westport, Ct., 1985), 69-93. Wandruszka, Adam, and Peter Urbanitsch, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848-1913, 5 vols. to date (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaft, since 1973), esp. vol. 3: “Die Völker des Reiches“ (1980). Scandinavia H. Norman and H. Runblom, “Migration Patterns in the Nordic Countries,” in Dirk Hoerder, ed., Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies. The European and North American Working Classes During the Period of Industrialization (Westport, Ct., 1985), 35-68. Russia Amburger, Erik, Fremde und Einheimische im Wirtschafts- und Kulturleben des neuzeitlichen Rußland. Ausgewählte Aufsätze, ed. Klaus Zernack (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1982).

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Towards diversity within ethnic majorities: Deconstructing the ‘Anglo-Celt’1 Katrin Urschel

Let all hatreds be forgot, All bitterness be swept away, Remembering only the glory of our lot In this century-honouring day! Celt and Scot and Saxon, let us only know, A mighty Queen comes to her own at last, Her people’s love and reverence---as the glow Of some splendid western heaven, Deepening into richer even, Ere it purples to the vast. from Wilfred Campbell, “Victoria (Jubilee Ode, A.D. 1897)” In his poem “Victoria (Jubilee Ode, A.D. 1897),” Wilfred Campbell urges his fellow Canadians to celebrate Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee with pomp and circumstance, and to disregard all previous enmities between them for the sake of a greater good. He specifically refers to previous ‘hatreds’ between Celts, Scots and Saxons that need to be forgotten to forge a Canadian “pan-ethnic civility.”2 This passage is notable for several reasons. First, it gives the impression that at the turn of the century Canada was inhabited by settlers from the British Isles only; Indigenous peoples, French or other European as well as Asian and Afro-Caribbean settlers are completely omitted from the scene. Secondly, Campbell seems to equate ‘Celt’ with ‘Irish’ which raises questions about his understanding of the term ‘Celtic,’ a term in the nineteenth century generally 1

2

I gratefully acknowledge the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for funding this research project. Moreover, I am indebted to Louis de Paor and Val Noone for drawing my attention to a number of Australian sources, and to the participants of the Negotiating Diversity conference, especially Larissa Lai, Allan Craigie and Katja Sarkowsky, for their valuable comments about racism, Britishness and Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners. Daniel Coleman, White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 83.

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understood to mean Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Manx, Cornish and Breton.3 And thirdly, in his call to forget all animosities – which is “a crucial factor in the creation of a nation”4 – Campbell propagates a form of Anglocentric nationalism that has no room for critical debates about inequalities of various kinds, prejudice, previous injustices, and brutal histories. Poems such as the above but also novels and stories, pamphlets, newspaper articles and other popular nineteenth-century texts helped create what is now termed Canada’s ‘Anglo-Celtic’ ethnic majority. These texts demonstrate that many Canadians have – until official multiculturalism was established – classified the typical Canadian as being descended from ‘Celt and Scot and Saxon,’ disregarding not only previous enmities between these separate ethnicities but also the existence of anyone else in Canada, which may explain why the term ‘Anglo-Celtic’ is so central in post-colonial discourse.5 On the other hand, as can be seen from this short extract of poetry already, the term ‘Celt’ alone can have a variety of meanings, depending on who uses it and when, which renders the category ‘Anglo-Celtic’ as a whole problematic, especially in the sensitive discussions of race, ethnicity, and multiculturalism. This essay is concerned with precisely this terminology and seeks to answer a number of questions. How is the term ‘Anglo-Celtic’ used today, and what is its implied meaning? What are the shortcomings of this super-category, especially when it is employed in a society concerned with recognition and representation of all sorts of identities? How can we deconstruct and genealogically trace the term and its components? What is the term’s relation to the discourse of race, and in particular ‘whiteness’? Furthermore, the essay looks at some specific examples from Canadian literature to situate the term in a relevant context, concerning both the term’s emergence and the post-colonial flaws and ironies within. Ultimately, this essay is a reflection on two post-colonialisms that position Irish and Scottish (and implicitly also Welsh) peoples as colonized in one case (British Isles) and colonizers in the other (Canada and the rest of the British Empire). As the term ‘Anglo-Celtic’ is a direct reflection of these, the essay argues for the abandonment of this term in order to explore post-colonial relationships, multiculturalism and racism in Canada more fruitfully.

3 4 5

Arnold Matthew, On the Study of Celtic Literature (London: Smith, Elder, 1867). Ernest Renan, The Poetry of the Celtic Races, and Other Studies (London: W.Scott, 1896), 11. See Coleman.

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The origins and current usage of the term ‘Anglo-Celtic’ The term ‘Anglo-Celtic’ describes the racial and ethnic category for people of – in modern political terms – British and Irish descent. It can be traced as far back as 1846 when in Ireland the County Cavan community newspaper The AngloCelt was established.6 Today the term is used in multicultural contexts, predominantly in Australia,7 but to an increasing extent also in Canada8 and the United States in both scholarly and public discourse. The British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa, for example, named its journal Anglo-Celtic Roots and hosted a conference with the motto ‘Celebrate your Anglo-Celtic Roots’ in September 2006. The League of the South in the United States uses the term in its political rhetoric, and proposes the preservation of their Anglo-Celtic heritage in the American South as a response to multiculturalism.9 The website is devoted to offering “a comprehensive overview of the Anglo-Celtic view of England.” Its authors are especially concerned with the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and, drawing on knowledge from various disciplines, try to prove that ‘Anglo-Celtic’ is a more accurate term than ‘Anglo6

Noel Farrell, Exploring Family Origins and Old Cavan Town: Cavan Town Roots (Cavan: AngloCelt, 1992), 31. 7 The Australian government cites ‘Anglo-Celtic’ as the predominant ethnic origin in Australia. Cf. National Communications Branch, Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, ‘Fact Sheet 4.’ For scholarly references see e.g. Kay Anderson and Affrica Taylor, “Exclusionary Politics and the Question of National Belonging: Australian Ethnicities in ‘Multiscalar’ Focus,” Ethnicities 5.4 (2005): 460-485; James Forrest and Kevin Dunn, “‘Core’ Culture Hegemony and Multiculturalism: Perceptions of the Privileged Position of Australians with British Backgrounds,” Ethnicities 6.2 (2006): 203-230; Ghassan Hage, “Anglo-Celtics Today: Cosmo-Multiculturalism and the Phase of the Fading Phallus,” in An Inquiry into the State of Anglo-Saxonness Within the Nation, ed. G. H., J. Lloyd and L. Johnson (Nepean: U of Western Sydney, 1995), 41-78; Carol Johnson, “The Dilemmas of Ethnic Privilege: A Comparison of Constructions of ‘British’, ‘English’ and ‘AngloCeltic’ Identity in Contemporary British and Australian Political Discourse,” Ethnicities 2 (2002): 163-188; and J. J. Smolicz, “Australia: From Migrant Country to Multicultural Nation,” International Migration Review 31.1 (1997): 171-186. 8 The earliest reference to ‘Anglo-Celtic’ I could track in Canadian discourse is John Daniel Logan, Songs of the Makers of Canada and Other Homeland Lyrics, With an Introductory Essay on the Genius and Distinction of Canadian Poetry (Toronto: W. Briggs, 1911). For use in contemporary Canadian literary and cultural studies see e.g. Coleman; Margery Fee, “What Use is Ethnicity to Aboriginal Peoples in Canada?” in Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism, ed. Cynthia Sugars (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2004), 267-276; and Lisa Grekul, Leaving Shadows: Literature in English by Canada’s Ukrainians (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2005). In Québécois subject matters, the term ‘anglo-celtique’ is used e.g. in Martha Radice, Feeling Comfortable? Les Anglo-Montréalais et leur ville (Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2000). 9 See Euan Hague, Benito Giordano, and Edward H. Sebesta, “Whiteness, Multiculturalism and Nationalist Appropriation of Celtic Culture: The Case of the League of the South and the Lega Nord,” Cultural Geographies 12 (2005): 151-173.

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Saxon’ as it acknowledges the history, the ethnic mingling, and the cultural richness on the British Isles. Scholars in a variety of disciplines suggest that members of the Anglo-Celtic community can be characterized, for instance, by specific genetic patterns, behavior and music. The historian Donald Harmon Akenson explores the background of this terminology with regard to Anglophone Canada and writes that since the advent of Multiculturalism, persons of Welsh, Scottish, Irish and English ancestry have been considered “a homogeneous lump, lacking ethnic ties and cultural traditions,” as well as “having the presumed vices of being both non-indigenous and non-ethnic.” Pointing to the fact that these people were most frequently called ‘Anglos,’ Akenson cautions against mislabeling. “One can denominate these persons as being either of ‘British Isles origin’ or (in the increasingly accepted international usage) as ‘Anglo-Celtic’,” but they are not to be confused with the ‘English’ or the ‘British.’ He justifies the label ‘Anglo-Celtic’ by pointing out that the people from the British Isles have become functionally one single group even though they may be still somewhat attached to the “particular segment of the Anglo-Celtic world from which their ancestors stemmed.”10 James Forrest and Kevin Dunne recognize a similar development in Australia, and claim that the label ‘Anglo’ was only recently extended by the word ‘Celtic’ after intensive lobbying mostly on the part of the Irish.11 Whereas both the Canadian historian and the Australian geographers make references to the various cultures that are summarized as ‘Celtic,’ they do not question this term’s usefulness for the discussion of ethnic identity in multicultural societies such as Canada or Australia. Only few Australian researchers are more cautious.12 Insightful criticism comes from the disciplines of literary and cultural studies. Even though Sneja Gunew finds the term ‘Anglo-Celtic’ useful to differenti10

Donald Harmon Akenson, “The Historiography of English-Speaking Canada and the Concept of Diaspora: A Sceptical Appreciation,” Canadian Historical Review 76 (1995): 375-409. James Forrest and Kevin Dunne 2006, 210. 12 The migration expert James Jupp points out that at least in New South Wales there have been attempts “to ban ‘ethnic’ and ‘Anglo-Celtic’,” since the colloquial use of both terms is delusive (J. Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3]. In his book The Irish in Australia, Patrick O’Farrell presents a loose connection between the Irish and their possible identification as ‘Anglo-Celts’ by saying that Irish identity in Australia carries a sense “of being separate, as coming from a particular place which conferred a personal sense of meaning and identity unique to that origin”, that this separateness was felt differently by the representatives of the various Irish traditions [Gaelic Catholic, Anglo-Irish, Ulster Protestant), and that therefore only some Irish willingly adopted the label ‘AngloCelt’ to compound their loyalties (P. O’Farrell, The Irish in Australia, 1788 to the Present (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), 6-7]. The Irish-Australian poet and scholar Vincent Buckley specifically argues the case for Ireland as a ‘source country,’ meaning that the Irish in Australia are psychologically attuned only to Ireland and to no other place. 11

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ate between the cultural and linguistic contributions of those who came from the British Isles, and those who brought other languages and customs to Canada and Australia, she considers it “fraught.”13 As Susan Ballyn noted, it elides the differences between the various Celtic nations in Europe and does not reflect the colonial history and power relations between them and the English.14 In short, the term is problematic because it unites several distinct cultures with the latter in effect subordinate to the former. The key word in these discussions is ‘ethnicity.’ Moving away from the tendency to associate ethnicity with linguistic, cultural, religious, and racial or ‘visible’ minorities, Australian and Canadian scholars postulate a re-inscription of ethnicity on the supposedly ‘ethnicity-free’ Anglo-Celtic inhabitants of these countries.15 As the ideology of multiculturalism requires everyone to produce an ethnic identity, it is mandatory that the various ethnicities subsumed under the label ‘Anglo-Celtic’ be studied also on their own terms. Historians have already acknowledged the ethnic diversity and power struggles of the ‘Celtic’ peoples in the United States, Canada and Australia.16 Alyson Greiner and Terry JordanBychkov have tried to do the same in the field of Australian geography.17 And Ronald McCoy, Michael Kidd and Felicity Allen have promoted the different Celtic ethnicities on the medical front, drawing attention to Irish and Scottish genetic predisposition to specific diseases and to the usefulness of correct ethnic labeling for early diagnoses.18 What about literature? Before multiculturalism became Canada’s defining ideology, Anglo-Celtic authors in this country were usually not studied with regard to their ethnic affiliations. What now, in the age of official multiculturalism, technically falls under the rubric of ‘Anglo-Celtic’ literatures used to 13

Sneja Gunew, “Foreword,” in Echo: Essays on Other Literatures, Joseph Pivato (Toronto et al.: Guernica, 2003), 7-28. 13. 14 Susan Ballyn, “Of Centres and Margins: Some Aspects of the Migrant Voice in Australia,” in Ethnic Literature and Culture in the U.S.A., Canada, and Australia, ed. Igor Maver (Frankfurt/Main et al.: Lang, 1996), 287-294. 287. 15 Margery Fee, “What Use is Ethnicity to Aboriginal Peoples in Canada?,” in Sugars, ed. 2004, 267276. 274; J. J. Smolicz, 172-173. 16 For instance, with regard to the Irish, see Joseph Lee and Marion R. Casey, Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States (New York: New York UP, 2006); Robert O’Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds, eds., The Untold Story: The Irish in Canada (Toronto: Celtic Arts of Canada, 1988); see also Patrick O’Farrell, op. cit. 17 Alyson L. Greiner and Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov, Anglo-Celtic Australia: Colonial Immigration and Cultural Regionalism (Harrisonburg, VA: Center for American Places, 2002). 18 Ronald McCoy, Michael Kidd, and Felicity Allen, “The Blood is Strong: Constructions of Celtic Health in Australia,” in Exile and Homecoming: Papers from the Fifth Australian Conference of Celtic Studies, University of Sydney, July 2004, ed. Pamela O’Neill (Sydney: The Celtic Studies Foundation, University of Sydney, 2005), 115-126.

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be plainly called Canadian Literature which is why scholars have until recently shied away from studying it with an emphasis on ethnicity. After the Canadian government adopted its Multiculturalism policy in 1971 the focus of literary scholars shifted towards ethnic minorities. The rationale behind this was the fact that the term ‘ethnic’ was, or even still is, generally employed to refer to those who are subordinate in power and privilege, even though, since it is derived from the Greek word ethnos, meaning ‘nation’ or ‘people,’ it applies to all persons “at least insofar as they possess distinctive cultural customs and languages.”19 Consequently, opening up the category ‘Anglo-Celtic,’ and studying the cultural contributions of the Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English on their own, will tackle and break down asymmetrical power relations, and foster equality by acknowledging different heritages that are equally ‘foreign’ to Canada as those of settlers of other ethnic backgrounds. Moreover, it will provide a richer understanding of the mainstream cultures in Canada and other former British settler colonies as well as shed much light on the formation of a national identity. The British, the Anglos and the Celts As Charles Taylor wrote, “[d]ue recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need.”20 Following from this, I propose to critically examine and question the different ethnicities that are combined under the umbrella of ‘Anglo-Celtic’ and to get rid of ‘Anglo-Celtic’ altogether. Similar to ‘Britishness,’ the category ‘Anglo-Celtic’ subsumes several ethnicities under one seemingly politico-territorial term, and although it may seem more suitable to classify people of British-Isles descent ‘Anglo-Celtic’ since Ireland ceased to be part of the United Kingdom, both terms are equally inept. The terms ‘Britain,’ ‘British’ and ‘Briton,’ which are all derived from the Romans’ name for their Atlantic island colony ‘Britannia,’21 came into wider circulation under Henry VIII and Edward VI and “became largely legitimized” when the Scottish Stuarts succeeded the Tudors in 1603 on England’s throne; as “a legal category” it only 19

Linda Hutcheon, “Introduction,” in Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions, ed. Linda Hutcheon and Marion Richmond (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990), 1-16. 2. 20 Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in New Contexts of Canadian Criticism, ed. Ajay Heble, Donna Palmateer Pennee, J. R. Tim Struthers (Peterborough: Broadview, 1997), 98-131. 99. 21 Alan MacColl draws attention to the contentious history of the term ‘Britain’ with regard to the Arthurian legend. According to him, the “land inhabited by the ancient Britons was roughly equivalent to the territory that became England and Wales and southern Scotland” (“King Arthur and the Making of an English Britain,” History Today (1999): 7-13. 8). This is one of the reasons why the Welsh are most often implied in the term ‘British’ when the Scottish and Irish are separately mentioned.

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emerged with the Act of Union that united the kingdoms of Scotland and England in 1707.22 Britishness as an identity was, however, not “formulated […] in the metropolitan centre but in the colonial peripheries.” Lowland Scots employed it after 1707 “to manufacture a looser cultural identity that would represent them not as junior partners in the larger project of English imperialism but as senior members and equals.”23 Over the course of the next centuries it became part of an ideology that was supposed to underpin the indissolubility of the various political unions on the islands, including the 1801 Act of Union with Ireland. It is important to point out here though that this rhetoric “systematically subvert[s] itself by its interchangeable use of ‘England’ and ‘Britain,” which, more than a harmless slip of the tongue, is a deeply held semantic preference which has historically indicated the limits of real British integration.”24 In the British Empire, ‘Britishness’ was mainly a passageway category for Irish, Scottish and Welsh settlers before they became true Canadians, Australians and so forth. Leaving behind their sectional identifications which were always reminders of a history of ethno-national conflicts and traumas, “the idea of Britishness represented a remarkable instance of reconciliation and ecumenism between previously bitter enemies.”25 It is true that “[w]e define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us;” our identity depends on our dialogical relations with others.26 Unlike the label ‘British,’ the category ‘Anglo-Celtic’ seems to – on a superficial level – describe just that: the endless quarrel between ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and ‘Celts’ over cultural and economic hegemony and representation. But does it really? Surely, breaking the ‘Anglo-Celts’ merely into its two defining subgroups would only lead onto slippery ground again. While it seems clear that ‘Anglo’ alludes to the English, the ‘Celtic’ component is a controversial issue. Who are the Celts? In short, ‘Celtic’ is a linguistic and an ethnic term. Ethnically, it refers to “a cluster of primeval European tribes alongside other clusters like the Germanic or Slav ones, the westernmost of Europe, whose presence and/or influence can be traced from the Bronze Age onwards.”27 Linguistically, it corresponds to a number of languages spoken in parts of the British Isles and Northwest France, namely Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, as well as to some long-extinct ones such as Gaulish. Murray Pittock distinguishes between ethno-cultural and civic-territorial/national dimensions of Celtic identities, with 22

Coleman 83. Ibid. 17. 24 Murray Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1999), 104. 25 Coleman 83. 26 Taylor 102-103. 27 Joep Leerssen, “Celticism,” in Celticism, ed. Terence Brown (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 1-20. 1. 23

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the former being a characterization mainly from the outside, and the latter the internal self-definition.28 Whereas the label ‘Celtic’ is supposed to indicate the territorial or national dimension when used in the compound ‘Anglo-Celtic,’ it is the ethno-cultural dimension that renders the whole term problematic. This concept of ‘the Celts’ is, as Malcolm Chapman, Simon James, Joep Leerssen and other scholars have pointed out, essentially a construct that carries a wide range of connotations and lacks precise meaning, especially because definitions have usually been supplied from the outside. Today this phenomenon is often discussed under the title of ‘Celticism.’ As George Watson explains, “[l]ike pastoralism or Orientalism, Celticism is a system of representation imposed by a hegemonic group on others with such success that those others begin to accept the truth of that alien representation.”29 Joep Leerssen places this construction process roughly between 1650 and 1850.30 ‘The Celts’ have consequently become associated with racial ‘Otherness’ as Ernest Renan’s essay La poésie des races celtiques and Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature, for instance, clearly show. Closely related to this perception of ‘Otherness’ is the issue of colonialism, that is, the asymmetrical power relationship between England and France as cultural centers on the one hand, and the ‘Celtic’ peripheral regions on the other, including linguistic, religious, or economic oppression to varying extents. Here needs to be added, however, that scholars are not even certain about whether Ireland, let alone any other ‘Celtic nation,’ could be called a colony at all, which makes the definition of the relationship between ‘Anglos’ and ‘Celts’ even more complicated.31 Pittock explains, “to describe the Celtic countries as colonial possessions is tendentious, but to describe them as inherently ‘British’ is equally so, as the oft-forgotten Britishness of Ireland shows.”32 Moreover, although it is clear that ‘Celtic,’ as opposed to ‘Anglo,’ refers to several ethnic groups, the term does not indicate who is meant precisely (cf. the poem above). The ‘Celtic’ peoples that are added to the English in the term ‘Anglo-Celtic’ usually comprise only those from Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Whereas it can be argued that those from Cornwall and the Isle of Man are left out for reasons of simplification, those from Brittany, France, are omitted because they do not fit the intended meaning of ‘Anglo-Celtic’ as ‘people who were descended from the British Isles.’ The meaning of the term ‘Celtic’ has indeed been obscured so far as that, on the one hand, Joep Leerssen can argue 28

Pittock 7. George Watson, “Celticism and the Annulment of History,” in Brown 1996, 207-220. 207. 30 Leerssen 5. 31 Leerssen 10; Pittock 112-115. 32 Pittock 116. 29

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that France “offers perhaps the best sample-case for ‘Celticism’ in general,”33 while on the other hand the term ‘Franco-Celtic’ as it is used in newspaper and internet articles can mean either a symbiosis of French and Irish/Scottish/Welsh cultures in the widest sense – Samuel Beckett as a ‘Franco-Celtic’ writer, for example – or a more particular French-Breton heritage. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the umbrella term ‘Celtic’ neglects the relations between the different ‘Celtic’ groups altogether. But the relationship between, for example, the Scottish and the Irish, or the Irish and the French, whether in Europe or in any of the former British settler colonies, can only be properly understood if the ethnic interrelatedness is taken into account, as has been proven, not least, by the debate about and exploration of James Macpherson’s Ossian.34 More to the point, the interrelation of various ‘Celtic’ groups and the ‘English’ by means of religion, language and class, for example, producing such sub-categories as Highlander and Lowlander in Scotland, as well as Catholic Gaelic, Ulster-Scots and Anglo-Irish in Ireland to name but a few, makes the term ‘Celtic’ seem more than archaic. Being such an imprecise and culturally fraught term then, ‘Celtic’ is not suitable as an ethnic category in contemporary discussions of multicultural societies. Profiting from the elasticity of whiteness Anthony D. Smith pointed out that a shared ethno-history is a necessary condition for the formation of a nation.35 The Canadian nation was created essentially by the British and the French who shaped its outlook through their languages, cultures and religions, and thus established themselves as the dominant ethnies. As members of the British Empire, Scottish and Irish settlers played key roles in this process. In the peaceable kingdom of British North America, they could overcome their status as inferior citizens, and contribute to the cultural design of the new nation. The ‘Celts’ and the English homogenized so much that Eric P. Kaufmann even counts the Canadian Irish Catholics as ‘British’ because they were “arguably closer to the WASP mainstream in Canada than Dutch and German Protestants.”36 However, this does not mean that there were and are no major differences between the various British and Irish peoples. Initially, they spoke 33

Leerssen 16. Leerssen 18. Anthony D. Smith, “Ethnic Cores and Dominant Ethnies,” in Rethinking Ethnicity: Majority Groups and Dominant Minorities, ed. Eric P. Kaufmann (London: Routledge, 2004), 17-30. 20-21. 36 Eric P. Kaufmann, “The Decline of the WASP in the United States and Canada,” in Kaufmann 2004), 61-83. 76. 34 35

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different languages. Speakers of Irish and Scots-Gaelic were among the earliest migrant workers and settlers in Canada, for example the Irish fisherman-poet Donnchadh Ruadh Mac Conmara who worked in Newfoundland in the mideighteenth century. Moreover, Gaelic was not only one of the first nonindigenous spoken languages in Canada but it also appeared in early print sources.37 The ‘Anglo-Celtic’ core ethnie could only come into being because of two factors. First, Canada’s First Nations were economically exploited and evangelized during the early settlement and expansion period, and played against each other in several wars (esp. 1757-63, 1812-14) so that the Canadian nation could be established within the framework of the growing British empire. Second, until the 1940s Canada was not so much seen as the territorially based nation it is now but more as a country that was culturally linked to Britain and, to a lesser extent, France, which was mirrored in its immigration policies. Consequently, the proportion of ‘Anglo-Celtic’ Canadians could remain considerably high until immigration of other ethnicities was facilitated by the ethnically neutral system from 1966-67.38 This development indicates that the ‘Anglo-Celtic’ identity in Canada was based less on a unifying ethnic heritage of European origin, and more on a shared experience as white English-speaking settlers in North America, eager to shape a new nation and to demonstrate superiority over indigenous peoples and immigrants of other backgrounds. This history of assimilation and domination implies a history of racism, and my whole argument makes use of the elasticity of whiteness. As Dionne Brand points out, one can enter Canadian identity easily “not only if one belongs to the so-called founding nations – the English and the French – but also other European nationalities like the German or Ukrainian” or Scottish or Irish. “Its flexibility and strength allow it to contain inter-ethnic squabbles […] without rending its basic fabric of white entitlement. The way in which that squabble dominates and preoccupies the political life of the country, regardless of, say, indigenous peoples’ claims to the land reveals the predominance of white entitlement.”39 Viewed from this angle, any claim to discuss discrimination, oppression and prejudice with regard to the Irish, Scottish and Welsh bears the danger of trivializing “the much greater level of oppression and racism faced by nonwhite peoples.”40 While it is important and necessary to remember the oppression-related 37

Juris Dilevko, “Printing for New Communities in German and Gaelic,” in History of the Book in Canada, Volume I: Beginnings to 1840, ed. Patricia Lockhart Fleming, Gilles Gallichan, and Yvan Lamonde (Toronto, ON: U of Toronto P, 2004), 289-292. 38 Ibid. 72-76. 39 Dionne Brand, “Notes for Writing thru Race,” in Bread out of Stone (Toronto: Coach House, 1994), 173-180. 174. 40 David A. Wilson, “Comment: Whiteness and Irish Experience in North America,” Journal of British Studies 44.1 (2005): 153-160. 153.

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factors that led to emigration and imperial participation on the part of the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish – lack of economic opportunities at home, poverty, starvation, misrecognition, penal laws, clearances and so on – the record in the settler colonies looks different. In fact, Daniel Coleman considers “the enterprising Scottish orphan” one of the four most prominent allegories in the process of positioning “white civility” as the defining feature of Canadianness in literature and beyond, together with “the Loyalist brother,” “the muscular Christian,” and “the maturing colonial son.” Only the Irish have kept the image of the disadvantaged underdog for a long time and have thus become one of the prime objects of investigation in the budding field of White Studies with How the Irish Became White probably being the catchiest study so far.41 And yet, as David Wilson noted recently, there was less anti-Irish prejudice and discrimination on racial terms in North America than previously claimed by scholars such as Roediger and Ignatiev.42 In caricatures of the second half of the nineteenth century, the Irish were often portrayed as ape-like creatures or as racially related to Africans, bearing a certain amount of nigrescence, both in Britain and the United States, but in general, they were more often prejudiced against because of their “putatively ‘pre-modern’ behavior” and their Catholicism.43 This was less a problem in Canada, of course, because not only was the relation between the number of Protestant and Catholic Irish reversed, compared to Ireland; the Catholics also had religious allies in the form of French Canadians. It is true, as Wilson made clear, that Irish people had many different allegiances and agendas. “To suggest otherwise would be to fly straight into the nets of exceptionalism and essentialism.” But how are we then to position and examine the Irish (and Scottish and Welsh for that matter) in a discourse of race and ethnicity? Wilson promotes a different perspective: “The supposed superiority of the self-racialized Celt is […] an important part of the story.” Consequently, “[w]hen it comes to the construction of race, the central issue is how the Irish became Celtic, and what that meant in practice.”44 In the first half of the nineteenth century, Irish-Canadian poets such as Adam Kidd and Standish O’Grady did not feel the need to write about ‘the Celt.’ Despite their firm rootedness in Irish Romanticism and thus the tradition of Thomas Moore, their political outlook was also realist and their texts are full of hope for a bettering of Ireland’s political situation. Their poetry conflates two decolonizing literary projects. 41

Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (London; New York: Routledge, 1995). Wilson 157. 43 Perry L. Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1971); Wilson 158. 44 Ibid. 160. 42

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Written between 1820 and 1840, it belongs to an earlier stage of the emergence of colonial-national literatures in Ireland and Canada. On the one hand, their texts are geared towards an English and imperial readership. On the other hand, their experiences as Irishmen made them suspicious of the colonizing aspects – both economic and linguistic – of English literature. Consequently, the two writers focused much on music, song and orality to capture distinct features of their surrounding cultures. Their aim was to preserve what was there; it was not to go back to a distant past and recapture what had been lost.

This changed in the second half of the nineteenth century when the attribute ‘Celtic’ became a marker of superiority. Before Thomas D’Arcy McGee, former Young Ireland nationalist, came to Canada in 1857, he lived in the United States for eight years and founded a newspaper in Boston (later transferred to Buffalo) named the American Celt. He and his editorial team chose this name because “we meant to adopt the opposite side of a popular theory, namely: that all modern civilization and intelligence – whatever is best and most vital in modern society, came in with the […] Anglo-Saxons.” The Celts were “a People brave, zealous for liberty, jealous of religious rites, capable of the highest discipline, and wielding the divinest powers of mind.”45 This theory drew from late eighteenth-century antiquarianism, a predominantly Anglo-Irish project of rehabilitating ancient Gaelic culture (for contemporary national and anti-colonial purposes) that was fuelled by the controversy over Macpherson’s forged ‘translations’ of the Gaelic bard Ossian in the 1760s. Since effeminacy is a common designation of colonial peoples, the rehabilitation of the Celt included a masculinization that was a counter-reaction particularly to its effeminate portrayal in the midnineteenth century that inspired and was nurtured by the writings of Renan and Arnold. It was the basis for the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Celtic revivals in Ireland and Scotland and proved to be, especially in Ireland, “a significant challenge to British identity.”46 This re-construction of ‘Celtic’ identity by McGee and others in North America was in essence a strategy to help the Irish overcome their inferior position in the class hierarchy. It gave them an ideal to aspire to, and also prevented them from degradation and political violence. McGee’s relocation to Canada had much to do with the prospect he saw for the Irish to achieve a strong position in an independent nation for once. He favored the social and political conditions north of the border, among them bilingualism and a disestablished church, and developed a vision for a confederated Canadian nation with a constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary system of government, in which people from various cultural, linguistic and religious back45 46

Qtd. in Wilson 159. Pittock 77, 142.

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grounds would enjoy liberty and freedom and live together peacefully. The political and cultural discourse around the time of Confederation was very racialized, and the rehabilitation of the Celt had come just in time to grant him entry into the selected circle of ‘superior’ races. In his 1869 lecture The Men of the North and Their Place in History, Robert Grant Haliburton deemed the ‘Northern races’ especially fit to settle in and govern Canada and, as many of his contemporaries agreed, the Celts were one of them.47 It is important to note that around the time of this debate, Canada was repeatedly attacked by Irish Fenians from the United States, most notably in 1866, and that the political outlook for the ‘Celts’ was not unanimously agreed on. The Fenians, on the one hand, an Irish Republican organization that fashioned itself after a band of ancient Irish warriors, fought for the decolonization of Ireland. They meant to forcefully split the union between ‘Anglo’ and ‘Celt,’ for example by invading Canada and bribing England into releasing Ireland as their colony; Canadian Fenians were to help them. Irishmen such as McGee, on the other hand, sought to intensify this union on the basis of equal rights – outside of the European battleground, with an ideology of progress and an attitude of superiority. By fighting for the integration of the Irish in Canada, they ultimately fought for colonization. These different political views are exemplified in the poetry coming from these two sides. The poetry of the Irish-Canadian James McCarroll, a writer with Fenian sympathies and a counter figure to McGee,48 seems at first ambiguous about the Celt. Otherwise an Irish nationalist, McCarroll appears to be writing favorably about English matters in his poem for the Prince of Wales, who visited Canada in 1860, Lines. [Not in the fierce, red glory of the battle field].49 Still, he does not go out of his way to promote a particularly strong kind of loyalism to the British monarchy. Evoking the peaceful-kingdom myth of Canada, he renounces warfare and declares that Canada is proud to be clasped “closer to [Britannia’s] breast.”50 The Prince and his Royal Mother (i.e. Prince Edward and Queen Victoria) are mainly praised for their efforts in keeping the Empire together. The Prince himself is assured “that thou hast a citadel in every

47

Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867-1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 53, 59, 131. 48 McCarroll and McGee were acquainted. McCarroll invented the Irish persona “Terry Finnegan,” McGee’s “loving cousin,” who came alive on stage and in satirical letters that were published in Canadian newspapers (Grumbler, Momus, 1861; The Pick, 1865; and The Latch-Key, 1863-4) and eventually in a separate collection (1863). “Terry Finnegan” always wrote to McGee with advice on how to best incorporate Irish political interests in Canada. 49 James McCaroll, Madeline and Other Poems (Chicago et al: Belford, Clarke & Co., 1889), 113115. 50 Ibid. 114

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loyal heart,”51 but the speaker cleverly conceals that not everyone might have a “loyal heart.” The last stanza is the most intriguing one for a discussion of Celtic identity: For here are no strange people, swarthy, grim or wild. To pour their feeble homage at thy gospel feet; But the sturdy Saxon and the fiery Celtic child Hast’ning with cherished household words thine eager ear to greet.52 When the speaker negates that “strange people, swarthy, grim or wild” could be present to greet the Prince it is unlikely that he had in mind Native Canadians, given that he makes hardly any references to Amerindians in his other poems at all.53 Given his fierce stand for Irish republicanism, however, he might in fact be refuting the common stereotype of the barbarian Celt here, only to trivialize him two lines below by describing him as fiery, and by letting him appear in the form of a child to take away the threatening character when he is accompanying the grown-up ‘sturdy Saxon.’ The emphasis in the interaction between the Celt and the English Prince is put on the sound (“thine eager / ear to greet”) which connects him to Kidd and O’Grady: everyone wants to get heard, and the Prince is prepared to listen. On the whole, the poem is both an attempt to resist degradation and homogenization and a co-opting of Irish interests into British imperial policy. As Coleman pointed out with regard to Scottish-Canadian poets though, such loyalist lines “are not so much irony as they are strategy; that is, they are consistent with the larger project of Scots [and Irish] throughout the empire to placate their English rivals with expressions of homage and loyalty that operated as a kind of flux between the categories of Britishness and Englishness, not just to fuse themselves into empire’s central alloy but also to recompose the character of that alloy according to their own values.”54 The poem that follows these

51

Ibid. 115 Ibid. “Boston Tea-Party No. 2” is the only poem in Madeline that features any Native Canadians – Mohawks in this case (285-286). The poem “At last! At last!” contains a metaphor that refers to Amerindians, “the red war-path of the Indian sun” (l40). 54 Coleman 90. 52 53

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“Lines” in his collection Madeline and Other Poems, “The Irish Wolf,” is again a severe criticism of English imperial policy and hypocrisy. “Resurgam!,”55 another one of McCarroll’s Fenian poems, seems to feature McGee’s brave, virile and disciplined Celt. The poem celebrates the Dalgais, the – as the attached note says – “favorite troops of Brian Borrombhe, or Boru [Irish king, c. 941-1014], who, when wounded in fight [sic] and unable to stand, requested that they should be lashed to a stake planted by the side of a sound man, so as they might still do battle.”56 The poem presents the ancient Celts as powerful and proud men who were welcoming of other clans and creeds as long as they would be united peacefully under the green flag. As a Fenian supporter, McCarroll wants to see this glory and peace restored in the present. The speaker therefore requests, “The haughty Celt shall stand erect, / As once he stood in other days.”57 In Fenian logic this meant standing erect as the victor in the violent battle for Irish independence. In McGee’s logic, however, the Celt would not be associated with this kind of violence; in his version – McGee even wrote a poem about ‘The Celts’ – the Celt is civilized and peace-loving, law-abiding and passionate about song and poetry. The closest he comes to violence is when he hunts. Real power lies only in the hands of the nature-gods whom he worships. No wonder that Canadians were eager to adopt this peaceful outlook into their national consciousness to counterbalance the brutality of imperialism and western expansion after McGee, their visionary thinker, was killed by Fenians! This is where the racism begins: in the link between the promotion of the Celt in Canada and the brutality of white settlement and expansion with dreadful consequences for indigenous peoples. It can even be argued that the Celt appeared in the discourse primarily to replace the Native. The concept of ‘the Celt’ surfaced at a time when Canadians were debating who belonged to the nation and who did not, and Natives were looming large in these debates – on the negative side. Paul Kane’s memoir, Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America (1859), was immensely popular. It received laudatory reviews, and was translated into French, Danish, and German within four years. In his preface, Kane “laments the inevitable disappearance of the Indian,”58 an observation that became one of the most enduring and racist ‘facts’ about First Nations, especially when white settlement extended westward and buffalo herds 55

The poem’s Latin title translates into English as “I shall rise again!” It was written for the newspaper The Irish Canadian and appeared in its very first issue on 7 January 1863. Soon after its emergence this paper was suspected of catering for a radical Irish readership and fomenting Fenian support. 56 McCarroll 169. 57 Ibid. 58 Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 1992), 194.

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declined. During the last three decades of the nineteenth century “‘Indian Commentary’ gained a new prominence.”59 Even though Terry Goldie is right in saying that “the search for indigenization is much broader and deeper than just a response to Celtic stereotypes,”60 it is still a relevant observation that there has been a particularly close association between Celts and Native North Americans. Commenting on the fact that the Cornish heritage and Scottish experience of Richardson’s eponymous figure Wacousta (1832) “make it possible for him to join the Indians,” Goldie points out that “[t]hese works imply that indigenization is easier for the Celts, because of their own association with an unstructured, free nature.”61 Joint adventures of Celts and Native Canadians are older than the national-imperial discourse of the late nineteenth century. Adam Kidd already situated much of his poetic subject matter in a Native environment or remarkable proximity to it in the 1820s. But these pre-1850s texts were firmly situated in the Romantic tradition and concentrate on individual representatives from ‘Celtic’ countries, predominantly Ireland and Scotland, and are to remind the AngloSaxons and their settler descendants what they have lost in the course of industrial progress and urbanization. They feature a conflation of European and North American versions of noble savages. The post-1850s ‘Celt,’ on the other hand, is a representative of an ancient civilization that has laws and ‘culture.’ This implies a community, as opposed to the Romantic individual, which is certainly no coincidence at a time when Canada is trying to build a nation, that is, to imagine a community (Anderson). Because of the assumed sophistication of Celtic civilization, Irish people reacted with outrage when they were compared to “savage Indians.”62 The racial hierarchy was very clear. Being Celtic was a higher and, more importantly, a European form of savagery, and incorporating that into Canadian civility was a form of indigenization and compensation. It served as a way of reclaiming a close relationship with the land, of restoring some of Europe’s ancient past on North American soil to create a legitimate history. It also served as the legitimation of the displacement of First Nations, according to the motto ‘we were always more advanced than you, so we deserve to replace you.’ This is most certainly the intended interpretation of the ‘Celt’ when the modern compound-term ‘Anglo-Celtic’ is used in contrast to ethnic-minority writers on Canada’s cultural margins, and especially Native writers. The Celt is the perfect accomplice in the building of a white and civil Canadian nation. 59

R.G. Moyles and Doug Owram, Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities: British Views of Canada, 1880-1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 169. Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 27. 61 Ibid. 62 Wilson 160. 60

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Labels, authenticity, and individuality The renewed interest in the Celts in the late nineteenth century does not explain why Campbell in his poem chose to only call the Irish ‘Celts,’ and not the Scottish too. It was certainly not merely a question of euphony for he made this distinction in other poems as well (for example, The Lazarus of Empire). Instead, it should be read as an indication of the rivalry between the Irish and Scottish in Canada, and as a gesture of snobbery. Of Scottish background himself, Campbell made it very clear by the choice of his labels which of the two he considered more modern and entitled to a separate, sophisticated identity. The Scottish, after all, had had leading roles in Canadian business, politics, religion and education much longer than the Irish, and through their early claim of Britishness were much more on a par with English Canadians.63 Considering these little details, it is necessary to acknowledge that the representatives of Celtic cultures were a much less homogenous group than often indicated. They may have developed similar objectives under the much celebrated image of the entwined thistle, shamrock and rose but they saw themselves as different peoples with very distinct features. For this reason too, the label ‘Celtic’ has to be handled very cautiously. Post-structural and post-colonial theories remind us that the labeling of identity is an act of power that draws from both fact and fiction. But the colonizer and the colonized are also constantly shape-shifting so that the boundaries of power and disenfranchisement become blurred, which makes critical analysis all the more necessary. Sneja Gunew asked recently, whether it was more useful in “an increasingly hybrid world […] to analyse mechanisms of racialization than to try to assign racial allegiances or ‘authenticities’.”64 Given that in any environment that has a history of colonialism and migration, the myths and forgeries of some become the truths (if only fragmented ones) of others (and vice versa), it is certainly more fruitful to study the process – in this case: racialization – than the fictions that are its beginning and its end. This is much of what this essay is trying to do, and what many of the scholars quoted here have been doing for some time. However, the power of literature in this matter must not be underestimated. For example, as much as Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners represents the Scottish orphan that Daniel Coleman has identified as one of the allegorical norms of white and civil Canada, the novel simultaneously demystifies this norm as it exposes the fictionality of communal identities on many levels not in spite of but because of being a work of fiction itself. At the end of the book, there are no ‘authenticities’ left. The novel’s protagonist Morag Gunn has 63 64

Coleman 5-6. Sneja Gunew, “Rethinking Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8.2 (2007): 141-148. 143.

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all the attributes that position her at the margins of what has been traditionally considered “the heart of whiteness (the white imperial/capitalist male subject):”65 female, orphan, Scottish, underclass upbringing, prairie home, single-parent, artist. She is simultaneously the norm and outside of it. Thus the book is central to the Anglo-Celtic Canadian canon while at the same time challenging it, posing and trying to answer the question of how we got to where we are. Laurence and her protagonist write back to Canadian classics such as Catharine Parr Traill’s and Susanna Moodie’s settler guides and Alexander Muir’s unofficial anthem, The Maple Leaf Forever. Morag loves the song as long as she feels included through the symbol of the thistle but she stops singing it as soon as she realises that this symbolism excludes and dispossesses others. She identifies the incongruence of Canadian histories as they are told by the descendants of Scottish settlers, the Métis and the school book writers, and she knows that they will never match as long as people continue to construct the identities of others by talking about and not to them.66 The performance of identity through speech and song is therefore at the heart of the book. Much of Christie Logan’s reading of Ossian’s poetry and his story-telling belong to the category of romanticized Highland myth, so the reader also has to be suspicious when Christie says that the Scottish Sutherlanders stayed neutral during the Riel rebellions since “the Sutherlanders didn’t trust the goddamn English, them bloody Sassenachs from Down East, no more than what they trusted the halfbreeds.”67 That the Scottish nonetheless might have been accomplices of the English becomes clear as soon as the reader hears Jules (Skinner) Tonnerre’s story. And yet, it is also revealed that there were many different Scottish factions – the Métis specifically mention Arkanys, men from Orkney – so that Morag in the end has no idea what her people’s history is. She personifies Scottish history when she marries the imperial Englishman Brooke. However, she leaves him before he becomes too patronizing and successful in rendering her speechless. But speechlessness has become part of her story long before that. The disconnection of Scottish settlers from the Gaelic language is a recurring motif. “Christie, telling the old tales in his only speech, English, with hardly any trace of a Scots accent, and yet with echoes in his voice that went back and back. Christie, summoning up the ghosts of those who had never been and yet would always be.”68 The loss of the native language is the one aspect that connects the ‘Celt’ in The Diviners with racism, as he is the earliest victim of England’s endeavour to dominate and force others to assimilate. In Canada, class and gender seem to be the dominant grounds of marginali65

Ibid. 141. Margaret Laurence, The Diviners (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1988), 79. 67 Ibid. 144. 68 Ibid. 264. 66

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zation for Morag, but in her relationship with Europeans it is race – if only in metaphorical terms. This is exemplified first in her marriage when, after Brooke requests that she always be happy and cheerful, she swears to herself, “I will never let him see the Black Celt in me.”69 Later, when she lives in London, the Scottish painter Dan McRaith calls her “Morag Dhu. Black Morag. Because of her hair, not her temperament, or so she hopes.”70 The ambiguity does not lie in the term alone. It also lies in the disconnection between the written and the oral, for neither does McRaith know how to spell the word “black” in Gaelic nor does Morag find a definite answer in the Gaelic Glossary of The Clans and Tartans of Scotland, a book Christie left her: “It says dubh, dhubh, dhuibh, dhuibhe, dubha, but omits to say under what circumstances each of these should be used.”71 Linguistic oppression and Highland Clearances are the facts of Morag’s own colonial identity; but her subjectivity in imperial history is turned into agency as her ancestors emigrated and subjected the Métis to a similar kind of oppression. Morag gives equal room to both of these experiences in her life, and she channels them into her writing. Her stories may not express “anything which we haven’t known before;” they are about marginalization and renegotiate the kinds of popular texts, fictions, and myths others have written about before. “But she says it. That’s what is different.”72 The ‘Celtic’ experience becomes a personal experience that transcends categorization. This situates the Celtic subject at the heart of Canadian literary discourse. For, what is a Canadian text? Does Canadian literature by definition mean the foregrounding of a particular, ethnic experience, thus acknowledging that there is a (universal) cultural centre elsewhere? Or is the incorporation of so many particular voices now what makes Canadian literature one of the most universal national literatures? It is precisely the recognition of Canada as a multi-ethnic state with an emphasis on equality and individual rights that challenges the concept of an ‘Anglo-Celtic’ ethnic core. It seems ironic that ‘Anglos’ and ‘Celts’ who had been facing each other in romantic opposition for centuries should form one single ethnic group in literary and cultural studies just because they supposedly had similar impacts on the formation of national cultures in former settler colonies of the ‘British’ Empire. Precisely these impacts have to be studied with regard to the specific ethnic backgrounds of the respective settlers to justly place the English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh next to all the other immigrants in the cultural mosaic of Canada and other countries with similar histories – without falling into the trap of authenticity quests, of course. This does not mean to ig69

Ibid. 246; original emphasis. Ibid. 400. 71 Ibid. 427. 72 Ibid. 266. 70

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nore questions of racism. The category ‘Anglo-Celtic’ contains two histories of racism; one in the subordinate position of the ‘Celt’ to the ‘Anglo,’ and a second one in the Anglo-Celts’ displacement of Natives and discrimination against other immigrant cultures. The racism that members of the ‘Anglo-Celtic’ community have exhibited towards First Nations, Asian, Black and other Canadians must not be forgotten; but neither must be the one English people exhibited towards the Scottish, Welsh and Irish. It is clear that the recent conglomeration of ‘ethnic writing’ produced by Irish and Scottish Canadians is a reaction to the huge amount of diasporic literature produced by Asian, Afro-Caribbean, Eastern European and other hyphenated Canadians.73 This reactionary move to be part of Canada’s new picture was enabled by a strategy that was aimed at giving voice to those people that had previously been shut up by the ones who are now reclaiming it for themselves. Nonetheless, there is a difference between the white ‘Anglo-Celtic,’ Protestant, heterosexual, middle-class male that has dominated the Canadian literary project of ‘white civility’ for so long, and the writer of Irish, Scottish, Welsh or English ethnicity who is aware of and celebrates Canada’s de-centralism, postcolonialism, multiculturalism and transnationalism because it reflects his or her own historical experience best. The ethnic writer from the ‘Celtic fringes’ is not interested in assimilating to a universal ‘Anglo-Celtic’ core; he or she seeks to enter a dialogue between different cultural communities to destabilize essentialism and racism. To subvert and transcend the hierarchy of victimhood it is necessary “to move beyond ‘singular identities’ to multiple and plural relations.”74 To reduce members of the ‘Anglo-Celtic’ community to the identity of the white civilizer denies them the right to be ‘ethnic’ and makes it even harder to break down the binaries between power and powerlessness. Therefore, Canadians should welcome Scottish, Irish and Welsh desires for origins.

73

The revival of Celtic languages in Canada is related to this issue of representation. The latest big development in this matter was the opening of the Gaeltacht Bhaile na hÉireann near Kingston, Ontario, on the certainly not randomly chosen June 16, 2007. 74 Enoch Padolsky, “Ethnicity and Race: Canadian Minority Writing at a Crossroads,” in Literary Pluralities, ed. Christl Verduyn (Peterborough: Broadview, 1998), 19-36. 30.

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The Worried Global Public and New Citizenship Practices in an Unheroic Age Daniel Drache

Since Obama’s 2008 upset election victory global publics have grown brasher, more articulate, numerically larger, bolder and more troubling for elites and their neo-liberal ideas and practices. Almost daily at such gatherings of the G 20 London meetings in 2009 powerful global images of protesters dominate the media when governments misstep and dissimulate. Derrida once wrote that “public opinion is a spectre,” present in none of the places “where it is held to be.”1 How perceptive he was about the vitality and innovative instinct of the lone ‘long’ lost public! Certainly the public is no longer a ‘phantom,’ a term coined by Walter Lippman in the early 20s, to account for a disenchanted citizenry that loses interest in politics and drops out. Instead it is tracked, measured, probed and analyzed in thousands of weekly global and local media polls. What I see is that modern global publics are cheering for their communities, their visions of the world, and they are giving a lot of themselves, too. Anyone can be a contrarian, a sceptic, or a battler in an information age. Today, according to Inglehart of the Michigan World Values Survey, anyone under thirty and many over fifty is as likely to be dissenters as conformists. With the demographics favouring the youth crowd, boomers and an emergent middle class in the global south numbering in the tens of millions worldwide, the recruiting pool of dissenters is virtually unlimited. The ‘disconnected observers of the system’ another term once in fashion to describe the public as a kind of undifferentiated mass is also now largely discredited as an accurate descriptor for our age. Some experts like Cass Sunstein and Bruno Latour believe that these networks and networking practices should be thought of as an extension of the Habermasian ideal of a transnational sphere of interactive communication. They contend that slowly over time, the global publics have emerged as a consequence of Web 2.0 a high powered two way model of participation. Simply put the radio and television made us passive consumers of information and the internet has transformed millions into active producers of information and ideas. We can use it for distraction as easily as engaged and 1

Bruce Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), ix.

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informed action. The rapid diffusion of new information technology correlates very closely with Castell’s original insight that capitalism is under fire from transnational networks, coalitions and advocacy campaigners with their own iconic heroes and ideas. These social networks provide a badly needed incentive structure for micro groups on and off line to organize and mobilize across state boundaries in unprecedented ways. This intense on line activism among discursive communities is a capstone achievement. We can see the magnitude of the information age in a single fact. The much in vogue Facebook has passed the 200 million mark of registered ‘users’ in April 2007 and its growth in attracting so many participants to dialogue and converse sets a modern record. New information technologies have succeeded beyond the wildest predictions in attracting millions of exclusive users. In one year the number of Twitter users has grown to 7 million, a fifteen percent increase from the year earlier. We see the spitfire growth of the Huffington Post of only four years in existence. According to Comscore, the ratings website, the HuffPo has wooed more than 7 million of the New York Times unique users and now has almost 20 million dedicated users. The critical idea is that the arrival of micro-blogging and social networking together has become a global hinge moment, a social phenomenon involving vast numbers of people across the globe from India to Indiana and seemingly everywhere in between. The End of History Idea and the Rise of Internet Activism In the space of little more than a decade when voting in elections in many countries has fallen to all time lows internet activism has supplanted membership in political parties as the preferred route for modern activists. The ability of these activist epublics to self-organize needs to be looked at with fresh eyes to understand the full potential of the high powered Web 2.0 participatory model of userdriven communication. Obama’s stunning victory over McCain has rewrittten the rule book for an underdog winning the highest office in the world against the odds. Even days before the presidential election many observers were predicting that Americans once in the privacy of the voting booth, would mark their x beside McCain, war patriot and an iconic figure of bravery in Vietnam. The implosion of his base never happened. Instead thousands of rank and file activists recruited through the internet and his website MyBo delivered the vote spectacularly. First time voters, Afro-Americans, those under thirty, Hispanic Americans, women and boomers over 50 voted massively for change.

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In the light of this unprecedented victory experts and governments everywhere need to rethink the role of the internet as part of their electoral strategy. But Obama will not be the only political leader to attempt to capture high office by reaching out to the disaffected voter, the sceptic and contrarian who until his upset victory likely didn’t vote or participate. Now every political party in the world is looking at his success in ‘connecting’ with the apathetic and indifferent voter. Not since Lyndon Johnson’s epic 1964 victory has any presidential candidate connected with the average voter. Almost fifteen million more Americans voted than in the previous election largely thanks to voting drives in the South to register Afro-American and first time voters and Obama’s use of Facebook groups to mobilize tens of thousands of supporters and undecided. The worried public to use Michael Waltzer’s eloquent turn of phrase has found an outlet in public activism and opened the door to a vastly expanded sphere of interactive communication. Why should this not only be happening but setting the stage for new citizenship practices on such an unprecedented scale?2 At first during the Cold War period, elites everywhere were convinced that they had tamed the shrew of public dissent. Capitalism was to be the basis for all social life, and market fundamentalism was to be the religion that gave us domestic bliss at home and peaceful prosperity abroad. In his bestseller The End of History, Francis Fukuyama saw no reason to alter this convenient arrangement. Millions agreed with him that this was the most pessimistic of ages, a period in which the public saw few possibilities beyond the paternalism of global capitalism.3 Today, coordinated and defiant activists are standing up to market fundamentalism and testing the conservative belief in a narrowly defined technocratic process of politics. These diverse publics in Australia, Brazil, and South Africa have challenged the command and control structures of undemocratic state authority and the new property rights created by global neo-liberalism’s agenda of privatization, deregulation, and global free trade.4 How could the high priests of supply-side economics, who preached the power of low taxes, freewheeling entrepreneurs, and liquid capital for global growth, have missed the other side of globalization – the rise of social movements, micro-activists, and networks of 2

Michael Waltzer, “Rescuing Civil Society,” Dissent (Winter 1999): 2: http://www.dissentmagazine .org/article/?article=1525 (accessed August 2009). 3 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Toronto, On.: Free Press and Macmillan Canada, 1992). 4 John Williamson, “What Should the Bank Think About the Washington Consensus?” Prepared as a background to the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics 1999), http://www.financialpolicy.org/financedev/williamson.pdf (accessed August 2009); John Williamson, ed., The Political Economy of Policy Reform (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1990).

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oppositional publics? How could Fukuyama, like many elites before him, have failed to learn Hegel’s biggest history lesson? Hegel, like the classical scholars he studied, understood well that history is a process of evolution and change. Social change is a foundational element of human society and the best efforts of the political class to maintain social structures that facilitate hierarchy and protect political privilege are ultimately selfdefeating. What should we make of these angry, defiant, self-organizing publics as they reshape the sphere of interactive communication and affect the landscape of electoral politics? How should we think about this new geography of power with its disorderly voices, opposing interests, and virulent claims? These are only a few of the pressing questions we must consider. Whether or not neoconservatives are prepared to face it, their defining moment is over. Moises Naim got it right when he wrote that: “concerns about states that were too strong has now given way to concerns about states that are too weak.”5 The singleminded obsession with crushing inflation has been substituted by a much more immediate need to regulate chaotic financial markets following the collapse of the US sub-prime housing market. A new global order is taking shape, and there is very little that Obama can do to restore American hegemony to its former glory. When Global Publics Step Up to the Plate Today publics are increasingly better informed and better educated about the world around them. Many decades ago the great American scholars Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton wrote about the social impact of the mass media, at that time print, radio, and television. They were deep pessimists about its “narcotizing dysfunctionality” and the information overload that the free flow of information has had on the world of the citizen.6 Two generations later citizen democracies no longer conform to this stereotype, if indeed they ever did. At the present time massive social change in the structure of power is intimately related to the remarkable evolution of the structure of communication. In previous times the technology of communication was highly centralized along with the mechanism 5

Moises Naim. (1999) “Fads and Fashion in Economic Reform: Washington Consensus or Washington Confusion?” http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/seminar/1999/reforms/Naim.HTM (accessed August 2009). 6 Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton, “Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action,” in Media Studies: A Reader, ed. Paul Marris and Sue Thornham, 2nd edn. (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2002), 22-23.

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of governance and public authority. We live in a very different world that is defined by the globalization dynamic in which the technology of communication and structures of public authority are highly decentralized, networked, and driven by a model of social relations rooted in a complex culture of consumption. When this occurs, society becomes destabilized by the intense diffusion of new information technology, new ideas and the anti-democratic top-down commandcontrol model of social organization. Like the rapid and massive introduction of the radio in the early twentieth century and the telegraph decades earlier, new forms of communication and political activism require us to rethink the dynamics of power and the way that digital technology reallocates power and authority downwards from the elite few towards the many.7 The individual in public: reasoning together At the heart of every dissent movement is a struggle with elite authority over how societies allocate public and private goods. Establishing the boundary line for rights and responsibilities between private interest and public purpose has always been intensely important, but is particularly so at a time when states, markets, and publics are negotiating the rules of economic integration and political interdependence. Societies need rules, and when political power is no longer contained within the nation state, finding new ways to address transnational issues, from poverty eradication to climate change, becomes a primary focus point for publics. If there are to be clear sites of national authority and a stable international community, the public domain, in which consensus, cooperation, and public discourse figure predominately, has a compelling role to play as one of the coordinates that will ‘rebundle’ identity and territory, in John Ruggie’s evocative words.8 Terms such as ‘the public domain’ and ‘public reason’ constitute the new vocabulary of global dissent.9 But it is this exercise of reason in public for defined social ends that has been pushed to the front of the agenda by new information technologies. These differently constituted discursive arenas should not be confused with the commonly accepted definition of the public sector. Nor should the public domain be limited to the provision of public goods, a staple of modern 7

Robert Cox, “Civil Society at the turn of the Millennium: Prospects for an Alternative World Order,” Review of International Studies 25.1 (1999): 3-28. John Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization 47.1 (1993): 139-74. 9 Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meagan Morris, New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Malden Mass.: Blackwell, 2005). 8

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liberal economic theory. The public domain is a sphere of political agency, first and foremost, in which individuals work together to meet collective needs and overcome complex political and economic challenges. The public domain, above all else, is a forum in which to be heard. This is a very different insight on what it means to be in public, but it is hardly radical. This definition of the public can be found in the political writings of Enlightenment philosophers and more recently, in the theoretical contributions of the aptly named and loosely defined recognitionist school of citizenship founded by Hannah Arendt and led today by Charles Taylor, Arjun Appadurai, and David Held.10 Recognitionism has become the dominant current in social science for thinking about the public domain. Even the term is new and its ideas reflect the need to transcend narrow academic disciplines such as law, economics, and political science. The irreversible trend toward the growth of democratic rights and the rule of law at the international level has gone hand in hand with a more inclusive approach to pluralism. Through this rights-based discourse the international community empowers governments to take collective responsibility for all their citizens. The urgent need to create pluralistic, diverse societies was born out of the catastrophic world wars of the twentieth century and the Holocaust. The colonial legacy of racism and social exclusion has been amply documented by anthropologists, historians, and cultural theorists. After 1945 societies began to rededicate themselves to humanist ideals best reflected in the growth of international human rights law. Philosophers have long argued that rights rest on a foundation of tolerance and social recognition. Without recognition of the uniqueness not only of individuals, but also religions, ethnicity, and cultures, there can be no strong system of human rights. Recognitionism has struck a deep cord with researchers worldwide. Its theoretical contributions range from a deep study of the transcendent ethic of human rights, to the power of public reason as one of the motors of transformative social change. It also presents a powerful explanation of collectively-minded individuals who form discursive communities of choice. The common thread that runs through the recognitionist school is plainly seen in the work of Charles Taylor, who declares that: “our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror 10

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 269-296; David Held, “Cosmopolitan Democracy and the Global Order: A New Agenda,” in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal, ed. James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 235-253

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back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves . . . due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people, it is a vital human need.”11 This penetrating read of recognition draws directly on Hannah Arendt’s theorization of the public as the primary site of recognition and the terrain of individual achievement. Hannah Arendt was one of the great postwar theorists of the twentieth century. She believed that a liberal society in a social democratic age was rooted in public transparency and individual actions performed in public. The right to have rights: The wide-angled vision of the Recognitionist school David Held explored the implications of this vital collective need. His key contribution is a sophisticated theorization of how the transfer of power from national to international levels has shifted the locus of citizenship. The cosmopolitan citizen does not need to choose between the community and identity that they were born into and the communities of choice that they belong to outside the traditional boundaries of their states and societies. At any time they may belong in multiple spheres of political interaction maintaining overlapping ideas and identities. Other schools of thought in this vein include the neo-Gramscians such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri who have gained a large following in cultural studies.12 Also the Network Society thesis of Manuel Castells has been influential among those scholars who are interested in mapping the shifting sands of structuralism.13 Uniquely Arjun Appadurai stands apart as a theorist of misrecognition. He shows how new forms of wealth generated by electronic markets have increased the gap between the rich and the poor. This phenomenon, coupled with fastmoving technologies of communication and highly unstable financial markets, produces anxieties about people’s identities. And these anxieties hold new potential for violence.14 No matter the school of thought, much attention has been focused on “things public” and the way we think about them because the one thing that all scholars now agree upon is that the public domain will be the defining arena of conflict and progress in the twenty-first century. The modern and multi11

Taylor 1994, 25-6. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York, N.Y.: The Penguin Press, 2004). 13 Manuel Castells, “Materials for an Exploratory Theory of the Network Society,” British Journal of Sociology 51.1 (2000): 5-24. 14 Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006). 12

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dimensional public domain has expanded beyond the bounds of elites and the control of the political class. As a body of public opinion, the sphere of interactive communication has lost its social exclusivity. You don’t have to attain a high level of education to be part of it. You can be a teenager at a cyber-café, a tenant renter in Bombay, a soccer mom, a boomer retiree, or from any of the inner cities of the world. The 1 billion person e-universe has not yet reached its limits. It keeps on expanding at the blistering pace of more than 10 percent annually. And many of the issues debated and discussed, such as the rights of children, once exclusively the prerogative of the private sphere of the family, are now subject to the public’s scrutiny. In an era of globally connected networks of communicative interaction, the personal is not only political, it is also public. Whereas Habermas thought that the institutions of modern society and government frequently attempted a refeudalization of the public sphere, in which bureaucratic interests trap the public in a clientelistic relationship with public authority, we think that modern communication technologies, which blur the lines between public and private, citizen and client, have widened the access points into public discourse and offer a phenomenal opportunity to democratize the public domain. Over the past three decades, the public domain has become more diverse, conflictual, and internally differentiated. More than ever, it is a sphere where theory, possibility, and the virtual can become real. The early modern conception of the public was rooted in a complex understanding of what it means to be an individual – a person with many different values, goals, aspirations, and motivations. If liberalism in political theory has given us a robust view of the individual living in society, then economic liberalism offers a one-dimensional caricature of the individual. Economic theory simplifies the concept of the socially embedded individual. The economic individual is a rational maximizer, a person who sees the world in terms of self-interest, economic utility, and scarcity. For the economic individual, the public does not exist as a significant category. Society is the totality of all individuals and is rooted in market activity. Those goods that individuals are unable to produce are produced through collective effort. These ‘public goods,’ such as national defense, are the rationale for a public sector. But there is no room in this view for a notion of public goods and the public good that is separate from economic need and the self-interest of individuals. When Margaret Thatcher pronounced in her famous 1987 interview with Woman’s Own magazine that “there is no such thing” as society, she was simply reducing liberal economic theory to its foundational assumption.

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The search for theoretical clarity about the modern idea of the public Most people intuitively understand a concept of the ‘public’ that sharply contrasts the understanding of Baroness Thatcher and other neo-liberal thinkers. For nineteenth-century liberals and twenty-first-century social conservatives the public stands in contrast to the private world of the family and the everyday experience of work. In the present we tend to define the public in terms of openness and inclusiveness with regards to the actions performed in public spaces as well as the attitudes and values that define ‘public’ values. When we think of the public as an ideal institution, we think of the Keynesian welfare state as a step up from the watchman liberal state. When we think of the kinetic energy of crowds and the revolutionary potential of the public, we think of the citoyens sans culottes. When we imagine the capacity of the public to reason about the common good, we think of the American founding fathers who came together to throw off the yoke of colonialism and build the first modern democracy. Public reason, for James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton, was an active process of thinking about the possibilities for a collective future, not the passive process of public opinion polling that passes for the general will today. All of these are part of what it means to be in public, yet we need to find our way out of the definitional morass that holds us back from thinking of the public today as an interactive environment in which we, as individuals, play a valuable autonomous role just as citizens have repeatedly done in the past.15 What is the relationship between the public as an institution, the public as a force for change, and the public as a body capable of thought and reason? Can our knowledge of the public even hold all of these concepts at once? The answers lie in the way we define the noun ‘public.’ In common parlance the public refers to space that is owned or supervised by the state, or the people who gather together in such a space. In this usage, people in public have little in common except their wish to experience some aspect of social life together, such as a speech, concert, or political protest. But this is not always what has been meant by ‘public.’ Hannah Arendt reminds us that in classical antiquity the public was a space of appearance and recognition, a space where individuals were recognized and actions could be judged. A person was affirmed in their individuality and recognized for their achievements in public. This idea dovetails nicely with Habermas’s idea that public acts of assembly and speech have the power to change the ways in which we are governed and the policies pursued by our governments. Public debate sets the rules by which society is governed. Every controversial 15

Engin Isin, Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

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action on the part of government is debated first in the public sphere. In this way we can understand the notion of the public to have yet another critical dimension. It is a sphere of uniquely endowed communicative action in which citizens can reach consensus on divisive and complex issues. From these definitions, we can imagine the public to be the decisive space for recognition as well as the sphere of choice for individuals whose action is informed by the process of reasoning together. Our common belief of what it means to be in public is not far off this mark, but we have been misled as to the capacity of the public for collective action because our definition of what it means to be an individual has been so thoroughly informed by economic theory. The classical appreciation of individualism emphasized the ability to reason with other people and the capacity to be recognized in public. Before economic liberalism claimed a monopoly on the concept of individualism and Marxism claimed the realm of collective action, classical political theory imagined that individuals need the public and that the public needs individuals. Contemporary citizen practice has reclaimed this older tradition of the individual and the public – a symbiotic relationship that was never properly understood by thinkers in the conservative and radical traditions. The great reversal: Devolving power downwards So far the ‘great reversal’ consists of three constant and cyclical phases. First, in the beginning period of globalization, political and regulatory powers were transferred away from the state and into the command and control structures of global financial corporations. In the early 1980s, markets for money were deregulated in the United States and corporate financiers were given new powers to redirect massive flows of capital as they saw fit. The value of derivatives markets and hedge funds skyrocketed into the trillions of dollars. New rights, and the attendant wealth and privilege, were given to the few; countless workers with wellpaying jobs were stripped of economic security. In the words of Martin Wolf, the lead economic reporter for the Financial Times, “there has been a big income shift from labour to capital – managers can earn vast multiples of employees’ wages.”16 The shocking extent to which this power transfer had taken place without the public being the wiser was first revealed by the spectacular collapses of Enron in 2001, Worldcom in 2002, and the Hollinger newspaper empire in 2005. 16

Martin Wolf, “The New Capitalism,” Financial Times, June 19, 2007: http://www.ft.com/ cms/s/0/d31c18ca-7c14-11dc-be7e-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1 (accessed August 2009).

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At the same time, technological change drove the other side of this double movement in which communicative power funnelled downward from the few toward the many. In every historical epoch, the Innisian bias of communication has had the potential to topple hierarchies and facilitate the radical transfer of political power. This does not happen the way that Marx imagined, with workers seizing control of the commanding heights of the economy. Rather it happens because information becomes a currency of exchange, and technological change democratizes access to information. Ironically, Marx was partially right. When the production of information becomes the highest goal of societies, digital technology and the Internet allow anyone to control their own means of information production. New technology encourages opportunities for social action and amplifies the voice of the activist. Second, just as printed text was instrumental to the birth of modern forms of national identity, so hypertext has given birth to the powerful idea of the global citizen connected to other citizens through the networked public. Print capitalism presaged nationalism, national community, and state sovereignty as Benedict Anderson has shown.17 The printing press, the map, and the museum constructed the ideal of the nation even as people’s lived experience remained firmly rooted in the local with no real identity beyond the village gate. At the time of the French Revolution only 11 percent of the population spoke French. Information moved at a snail’s pace and even as late as the 1860s a quarter of French army recruits only knew patois. The same is true today of the Internet, the satellite, and the news broadcast, which construct the possibility of an idealized global village, a term coined by Marshall McLuhan, even as most people remain local actors. The dominant feature of globalization has been a slow bleeding of power from the national level, toward regional organizations, international institutions, and non-governmental actors. Information flows are behind this structural transformation, and Manuel Castells demonstrates the way in which new informational processes create a new form of consciousness today in the global “network society.”18 A pessimistic reading of this process is that national sovereignty has been subverted, and the nation-state is being hollowed out by multinational corporations. A more optimistic reading focuses on the way that citizens are developing new forms of engagement to achieve their goals at a time when the old templates of authority and loyalty no longer fit the contours of social life.

17

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, U.K.: Verso Press, 1991). 18 David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995); Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996).

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Finally, these new citizenship practices have become the motivating ethos for emergent forms of transnational public action. Micro-activism is the idea that individuals can make a difference through their actions wherever they live, work, or meet. Micro-activism is entrepreneurial in the Schumpterian sense because it creates new political forms where none existed before; projects are undertaken in an ad hoc way, with individuals rising to take action on an issue that they feel strongly about and disengaging after they have made a contribution. Microactivists recognize that they can participate in the public sphere without devoting decades to gaining credentials and developing the legitimacy of a specialist. In a very real way, micro-activists recognize there can be no individuality without being in public, and there can be no public without a concrete understanding of others as individuals with their own hopes, dreams, and desires. None of this is to suggest that the act of being in public or the reasoning of micro-activists is necessarily enlightened or progressive. Publics are often just as reactionary as the worst dictators. Activists can be informed and forward-looking, or biased and prejudiced. They can be autonomous, independent-minded, and contrarian. Or they can be moulded, manipulated, and kept on a short leash by elites. Diversity is always the rule, but . . . In their agential aspect, modern defiant publics are the sum political power of many different people, whose only common goal is the public good. For sure, these people and groups are often working at odds with each other. One only has to think of the Taliban’s understanding of the public good in Afghanistan and juxtapose it with the Bush administration’s vision of the public good for the Middle East to see that no single group has a grasp on what is good for all of us. In fact, it is the sovereign responsibility of our elected representatives to wisely choose the best policies that will benefit most of us. Even more importantly, we count on them to implement other measures for those who are not helped and are perhaps hurt by the will of the many. Public agency has its clearest expression in democratic governance, but publics are increasingly aware that democracy is quite literally the rule of the majority, and this requires that citizens think carefully about the way their policy choices affect others both at home and abroad. It is necessary to follow the argument to the next step. In its structural form, the spatial idea of the public is harder to grasp. Is it one domain or many? Public culture is a loosely related collection of local, regional, national, and transnational cultures. They are linked by shared memories and values. They have their own myths, heroes, villains, aspirations, and dreams

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and are rooted in local histories and lore.19 Who, beyond the borders of Canada, knows the names of the rebels of Upper and Lower Canada who forced British colonial administration to develop a more responsible form of government? William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis-Hyppolite Lafontaine are public icons in a small sphere, just like thousands of other larger-than-life figures that populate the narratives of public memory. Clearly, there are many different public domains at the national level, and they are organized and regulated according to the values and norms of their particular cultural context. They are sometimes larger, sometimes smaller. Sometimes they are inclusive and restorative of the social bond by universal education and poverty eradication, and sometimes they are exclusive, ceremonial, and authoritarian to cite only the dangerous use of war chauvinism.20 Will progressive states, activists, and social movements succeed in creating an inclusive domain for public interaction beyond the state? Quite possibly, the public domain beyond the state will be an inclusive global zone where an infinite number of individuals and groups will interact with each other despite their competing nationalisms. Yet as Kant foresaw, there is always danger in perpetual struggle towards an idealistic goal. World government would be what he termed ‘soulless despotism’ if it did away with the republics that give boundaries to the space of citizenship. It is not surprising then that the WTO’s erosion of those boundaries and intrusive presence in domestic standard-setting has awakened a centuries-old fear that larger governance agglomerations will surely undermine rights and disenfranchise the most vulnerable.21 The private world of social preferment and global competition has a way of rewarding the fittest at the expense of the rest. The Hayekian vision of the market becomes too intrusive when private actors overtake the public interest and appropriate collective goods for private gain. Even so, national publics have never been simply creatures of the state. They arose in tandem with the sovereignist theories of the nation-state to be sure, but their genesis must be traced back to the rise of public reason, the gradual appearance of the sphere of interactive communication, and the efforts of activists and intellectuals. Nevertheless, modern public authority, with its arsenal of policy tools from monetary to social policy, must protect the social bond from corrosive pressures. It is of the utmost strategic importance that citizens in democratic societies wrap their minds 19

Charles Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 91-124. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 1998), see chapter 5, “Global Law, Local Orders.” 21 Emmanuel Kant (1794), “Perpetual Peace: First Supplement,” http://www.constitution.org/kant /1stsup.htm (accessed August 2009); John Ralston Saul, The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World (Toronto, On.: Penguin, 2005). 20

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around a single proposition: every society must take self-conscious measures to reinforce its public domain, whether in full-scale or piecemeal fashion. Lineages of the modern public For twenty-first century discerning publics the strategic questions are: what do we really know about the origins of the public domain, how can it be strengthened, and what lessons can we draw from history? In a rudimentary way the idea of a domain of public concern begins in antiquity. It emerged with the growth of cities, the delivery of early types of public goods, such as defense and food rationing, and the emergence of bureaucracy, the military, and the courts. In Lewis Mumford’s words, the public emerged with the introduction of drains, piped drinking water, and water closets into the cities and palaces of Sumer, Crete, and Rome. Cities needed an infrastructure, roads, harbours, ports, and an administration to collect revenues, maintain order, and organize pageants and spectacles for the masses.22 The public was a terrain of strategic planning and engineering accomplishment. It was a practical and ingenious solution to the problems of urban densification in early settlement, much like today. It was at the center of daily life since antiquity where the formal world of politics and private interests were played out. In his book How to Make Things Public, Bruno Latour asks “has the time not come to bring the res back to the res publica?”23 The stuff of the res publica – ‘public matters’, literally translated from the Latin – has never been in doubt. Things public have always been serious business for the engaged citizen because so much is at stake when we set out to develop the domain of the common good. There is no consensus on the part of scholars about the precise origins of the boundary between public and private. Who first manned the frontier between the good of all and the privilege of the few? In Greek mythology, Prometheus is the great defender of the public; defying the gods to bring fire to humankind. In Judeo-Christian mythology, an angel with a flaming sword guards the gate to Eden and forces humanity to make common cause in suffering. Sociologists and anthropologists offer a more prosaic explanation. For Michael Mann and Charles

22

Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformation and Its Prospects (New York, N.Y.: Harcourt Brace, 1961). 23 Bruno Latour, “Introduction: From Realpolitik to Dingopolitik or How to Make Things Public,” in Making Things Public – Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 14-43. 24.

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Tilly the public interest can be traced to the need for increased public goods provision, particularly in times of war and insecurity.24 The military historian John Keegan reminds us that it was initially warfare and the aggressive cost of empire and not an incipient belief in welfare that built the public domain in most European countries. In the nineteenth century an effective fighting army required public authority to improve the health and living standards of the average conscript.25 In England, parliamentary committees discovered that as much as a quarter of conscripts were too malnourished to fight for king and country. Taxation was also initially a result of military adventurism. Income tax was introduced, in William Gladstone’s words, “as an engine of gigantic power for national purpose.” The rationale, he argued, was not to tax the undeserving rich, in order to use taxation to help the deserving poor.26 But his contemporaries knew where the money for empire building actually went; the country had to pay for the glory of going to war, and this entailed massive public spending. In 1820 in the UK, 80 percent of government spending went to the military and soldiering, while only 10 percent was spent on civil society. Sixty years later, nonmilitary spending such as on welfare and public goods had increased to a paltry 20 percent.27 In the passage from feudalism to capitalism, if we step back a moment and look at the dynamics of the way the public domain evolved, it is clear that the category of the public evolved through fits and starts. The entanglement of public interest and private markets was constantly in flux, and the emerging boundaries between them were inevitably contested. Earlier on, probably from the sixteenth century, the state was paradoxically a stabilizing force for societies because it reinforced class relations at the same time that it strengthened the very idea of society torn by conflict and held together by the forces of order. It is one of the great ironies of history that the egalitarian and inclusive public emerged from inauspicious beginnings in absolutism and the preening presumption of the new bourgeoisie. In Europe, for much of the medieval and pre-modern period, there was no political language of the public good and no political culture or institutional space of the public interest in the modern sense. As Louis XIV indulgently 24

Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power: A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power: The Rise of Classes and Nation States 1760 – 1914 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States AD 990 – 1990 (Cambridge, Mass./ Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell, 1990). 25 John Keegan, The First World War (Toronto, On.: Vintage Press, 2000). 26 Roy Jenkins, Gladstone: A Biography (London, U.K.: Macmillan, 1995), 280. 27 Ibid. 67.

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stated, “L’État c’est moi.” Public offices were bought and sold, and the landed aristocracy and upper classes, the avowed enemies of constitutional guarantees of social rights, relied on the rule of law to suppress communal interests. The modern idea of the liberal public as a freestanding and autonomous sphere began to emerge in Britain only with the closure of the commons in the seventeenth century and would take a century or more to complete its long and complex institutionalization. Historians have shown how shifting agricultural production patterns ushered in a legal regime of private property and the abolishment of the principle of common land use.28 The privatization of rural land placed new demographic pressures on cities, but urban public space remained restricted to the moneyed elite and later the emerging professional classes. Jürgen Habermas reminds us, in his magisterial study of the public domain, that anything we would recognize today as a robust public sphere emerged gradually and much later as part of the rule of law and the end of absolutism.29 Fealty – loyalty to the clan, race, and family and faith – constricted the appearance of the public domain proper until the late eighteenth century. To be in the public was synonymous with bourgeois respectability, the rigid maintenance of law and order, service to the nation, and, above all, strict conformity to society’s belief in sobriety and private property. So many groups, classes, and individuals were excluded from the formal world of debate and deliberation. This was hardly an auspicious beginning for our modern belief in the deliberative public sphere as a privileged place of interaction, political freedom, and citizenship. The public domain took on a life of its own in the nineteenth century as part of the larger political project to enhance the security of elites and form a privileged site for the middle class. On the European continent, desperately needed urban reforms, such as roads and proper sanitation facilities, added public goods as a constituent part of the public in cities – although its autonomy was precarious and the spread of democratic rights of speech and assembly often in question because there was as yet no clearly articulated public interest nor legal idea of the citizen protected against the state and the private interest of property owners. The classes without property were regarded as dangerous elements to be disciplined by the rule of law and kept in check by police magistrates. Citizenship was rudimentary and not yet a legal category with judicial clout. The authoritative idea and legacy of the French Revolution – that of ‘rule by the people’ – would have momentous consequences on political thinking as it captured the 28

James Boyle, “Foreword: The Public Domain the Opposite of Property?,” Law and Contemporary Problems: Special Issue on the Public Domain 66.1 (2003): 1-32. 29 Jürgen Habermas, The Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).

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imagination of working people across the globe. By the middle of the nineteenth century, traditional forms of being in public – the market and the fair – had been reinvented on a vast global scale, aptly called World’s Fairs. The international public sphere was getting organized by the flows of ideas, people, money, and information. Three models of citizenship beyond the state It used to be that globalization was measured by the exponential growth of world trade and the technological leap of the digital revolution. In a century or more, historians will also measure twenty-first century interdependence by the metrics of the Great Reversal. Hierarchical authority, centralization, and what Inglehart refers to as ‘bigness’ are under increasing strain, burdened by the mistrust of the multitude. These sentinels of extreme economism “have reached a point of diminishing effectiveness and diminishing acceptability.” The public shift is underlined by a move away from traditional state authority and the new radical powers of the market – what Inglehart calls a shift from “scarcity values” to “security values.”30 Even so, contemporary public life is an entanglement of public and private interests. The strategic notion of the public domain as a critical space of ideational competition and collective action requires, above all, greater clarification and a more precise benchmarking of its effect upon democratic public life. The era of global monetarism has lasted only half as long as the golden age of the Keynesian welfare state. Its fate was sealed when global publics lost confidence in elites who promised that stringency and self-help would release the market from its bonds and create unprecedented prosperity. Transnational networks rooted in the local open the possibility of new varieties of citizenship by enhancing the importance of recognition. They reveal the public as a sphere of unplanned encounter, fluid sociability among strangers, and multi-stranded public life.31 For the foreseeable future, there are three divergent and often competing models of citizenship on offer in the global realm. The first is the Anglo-Republican model of citizen participation. It has been aggressively promoted by the US trade representative and British and American regulators who believe that the global citizen is essentially an Anglo-American 30

Ronald Inglehart, “Changing Values, Economic Development, and Political Change,” International Social Science Journal 47 (1995):653-403. 31 Jane Jacobs, The Life and Death of American Cities (New York, N.Y.: Vintage, 1961); Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar, eds., Public and Private Thought in Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

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prototype of the international entrepreneur. His basic rights are guaranteed by his national passport and his standing in a national community. The other substantive entitlements he enjoys are rooted in his economic rights and the WTO’s regulatory model of global governance that Michael Trebilcock has termed “negative integration.”32 Negative integration is a form of economic governance that outlines the actions that economic actors may not take. It focuses on the ‘thou shalt not’ side of governance and remains silent about the obligation owed by economic actors to the international system. Its minimalist approach to rule making leaves a very small window of opportunity for developing substantively inclusive institutions beyond the state. Proponents of this form of citizenship had hoped that the WTO would become a sort of economic constitution for the world. It would fulfill the same basic role that the American constitution did for the thirteen original colonies – namely laying out the basic rules for a free-market economy. Thinkers in this vein tend to believe that citizenship beyond the state can only be guaranteed by a global constitution; until such a time as the world is ready for a common set of rules, state power must stand in the place of a constitutional order. Nothing more clearly illustrates this perspective than the current issue of reform at the WTO. Its architects, rather than creating a trade organization that would deal with the substance of trade challenges, such as labor standards, created an institution that engages only with narrow legalistic issues and develops the barest framework necessary for a stable order. Proponents of this citizenship model assume, like James Madison and the rest of the American founding fathers, that the countervailing power of liberal economic actors is the only guarantor of political freedom. The global provision of public goods, intergenerational responsibility for the environment, and the eradication of extreme poverty and illiteracy remain off its radar screen because these are challenges faced by the poor and the default template of the global citizen is a person of economic means. This model has a very weak redistributional impulse because it thrives on status quo stability, rather than innovation and the championship of change. In this worldview, the citizen is the working out of a Tocquevillian figure of voluntary association and rational individualism; he is an individual driven by economic self-interest, not collective need. The second model of citizenship beyond the state is that which takes as its basis the European-Federalist model of governance integration. In essence, the European model advocates the construction of a new level of political authority, 32

Michael Trebilcock, Trade Liberalization, Regulatory Diversity and Political Sovereignty (Toronto, On.: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Geoffrey Underhill, “States, Markets and Governance for Emerging Market Economies: Private Interests, the Public Good and the Legitimacy of the Development Process,” International Affairs 79.4 (2003):755-781.

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formally rooted in state sovereignty, and based loosely on a federal model of governance that is qualitatively more similar to the national governments of Canada and Germany than the United States, because they have very strong subnational governments which are bound together by a high-wage, high-tax, high-skill approach to citizenship and economic management. They believe that federal community is rooted in investment in the social bond. This model of a social market rests on the assumption that political integration, what experts call ‘positive political integration,’ creates new linkages between people and territories, and these provide a stage upon which citizens may exercise their political rights. The different levels of federal authority – regional, subnational, national, and maybe even global – guarantee citizenship rights through an institutional arrangement of judicial and administrative checks and balances and international public law. This is a progressive and analytically audacious vision of global citizenship, and its architects are convinced that it can be broadened to include a number of developing countries. In the European-Federalist model, the complex interdependencies of the market need to be managed, and market relations need to be rendered open and visible just as the activities of government bureaucracies need to be scrutinized and made transparent. It advocates a centralization of political authority that makes it possible to guarantee certain rights through governmental machinery located in Brussels, rather than London, Paris, Berlin, or Prague. This model is intensely process-driven, and corporatist consultation is the primary mechanism by which governance change takes place.33 It is a model in which everyone involved has a say in the outcomes, in theory, but experts point out that the flaw in European process-driven integration is that powerful business elites dominate the administrative and legislative system. Like the AngloRepublican model, access to economic resources tends to play a significant role in who gets what, and the citizen is understood to operate in an arena of public choice. The biggest difference between the two models is that the European citizen is far-sighted enough to see that political integration is a better guarantor of rights than is the power of the state on its own because state power has a way of waxing and waning, as the history of Europe has shown. The clearest expression of the European-Federalist model of citizenship is public space that is highly contested and social activists who are constantly multiplying their efforts to claim a larger share of federal resources for their public-interest projects. They 33

John Ruggie, “Reconstituting the Global Public Domain: Issues, Actors and Practices,” European Journal of International Relations 10.4 (2004): 499-531; William Wallace and Julie Smith, “Democracy or Technocracy? European Integration and the Problem of Popular Consent,” West European Politics 18.3 (1995): 137-57.

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are persistently pushing the envelope to build public domain networks from below. The third model of citizenship that is being developed and articulated is the developmental model of public citizenship. This template of the public is embedded in the Arendtian principle of the right to have rights. Citizenship rights are guaranteed for every person by every person; citizenship is not earned or deserved because of who you are, what you possess, or your status as a smart economic actor but instead is bestowed by virtue of common humanity. Political philosophers and policy elites alike are wary of the implications of this form of citizenship because it requires a radical rethinking of what it means to recognize another person in public, and it sets a high bar for the social responsibilities required of all of us. It would require a massive global redistribution of wealth because much of the global north’s economic muscle comes from an inequitable relationship to developing countries, which have been left in a dependent position of low value-added production and service provision. This model of citizenship is not yet fully defined or articulated and is a work in progress. But it is being developed nevertheless persistently and patiently in piecemeal fashion in the thickening bed of international institutions that are clustered around the United Nations. The developmental public is popular in the global south, where there is little prospect for a European Union style of integration because economies are not stable enough, and there are too few shared values to justify such an intrusive form of political integration. Many countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia have been skeptical of the AngloRepublican model of citizenship rooted in economic integration. Liberal citizenship, idealized in American political life, based on the self-starting individual is far removed from the reality of the street, the bazaar, or even the process of nation building – all of which encompass what it means to be in public in the global south. Publics in the global south need a vocabulary and vision for protecting and expanding the public domain. They need to reconcile many different definitions of the public good and interests held in common.34 The WTO negotiations have proven conclusively that the Anglo-Republican form of citizenship is actually corrosive for fragile and emergent forms of citizenship in the global south because it is only guaranteed by the hard power of economic superiority. The Anglo-Republican belief that the wealth of the few guarantees the rights of the many sticks in the throat of small nations who depend on American markets for their global trade, but have little say in the way that the multilateral trading system operates. 34

Sarai Reader, The Public Domain (2001): http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/01-the-publicdomain (accessed August 2009).

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In 2000 the United Nations recognized the pressing importance of putting in place an institutional frame to address the negative externalities of economic globalization. The Millennium Development Goals are a prime example of the way in which the developmental public builds support and cements its legitimacy amongst its many members.35 It is well recognized by neo-conservatives and liberal reformers alike that the United Nations system is troubled and faces large hurdles in the near future. Its legitimacy rests on the fact that it is by far the most inclusive system ever created at the global level. This leaves it vulnerable from within to politicians who would undermine it, whether they are from the Bush administration or the regime of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Also, its outdated processes leave it vulnerable to insider cronyism because too few states outside the G8 in the north and G24 in the south have actually mastered its diplomatic and bureaucratic complexities. But these are not reasons to weaken it further. Rather, our concern with higher order issues of institutional effectiveness suggests that the United Nations experiment has been a partial success. The job now is to retool and strengthen the mechanisms of democratic participation to make them more responsible, accountable, and transparent. The main drawback of this model is that it rests exclusively on a Westphalian assumption of state sovereignty and therefore accords only states the prestige of full citizenship. This model has not yet fully developed an understanding of global citizenship that extends to the individual, although the growth and evolution of human rights law and the International Criminal Court are transformative movements in the right direction. The strength of this model draws from the fact that it is based on the formal equality of all nations and gives their publics equal status under international law. Pluralism and diversity are necessary prerequisites to the development of a public domain that is both open and inclusive at the global level. Addressing these challenges is part of the normal development process that slows the emergence of a sphere of global publicness. To remove them is to accelerate its progress. A Habermasian or Foucaultian public sphere? The reallocation of power that comes with technological change is hardly a new phenomenon, but its dynamics are of singular importance to grasp. Today, the 35

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals Reports are available at the United Nations Homepage: http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/reports.shtml; see for the United Nations Millennium Declaration (2000): http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration/ares552e.pdf (accessed August 2009).

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digital communications revolution is also changing the social landscape, with the power to free millions of people from the marginalization that comes from having no voice in global affairs. These three major transfers of power, from market to state, from men to women, and from transnational elites to the global citizen, share a common theme. They have been the great levellers of class relations in the twentieth century and have redefined the power dynamics between agency and structure. None of this has occurred in the way that Marxians had hoped for. Nor does this vision conform to Foucault’s complex vision of society completely dominated by disciplinary neo-liberalism. The post-structural lens has not been able to account for vibrant powerful and ultimately effective defiant global publics and the unprecedented reach of the global citizen. Habermas’s idea was that citizens can change state policy through acts of assembly. “No one, as Habermas says so eloquently, can be brought to apply the results of a decision if he has not participated in the discussion that led to the decision.”36 Before the Internet era, he thought that this had to happen through face-to-face interaction. Today, digital technology has facilitated this process in a radical and decentralized way, and communities of unprecedented influence and reach are formed online. The Washington Consensus prioritized system and structure as the key drivers of public policy; Internet, satellite communications, cellular phones, text messaging, and even radio and television have turned conventional wisdom on its head. The global cultural economy is instrumental in shaping the fully realized citizen, rooted in the local, but deeply interested in, and able to influence, global issues and events by forming active communities of choice rather than disinterested communities of fate. In a post-9/11 world, the margin is filling up once again with the multitudes from the global south, and everywhere the political center is crowded with articulate and angry skeptics and contrarians. Micro-activism has exploded as a global phenomenon of our age and the list of what is shared in common is no longer shrinking. The pessimism of the neo-liberal crisis is challenged by the skepticism of dissenting publics and rebellious activists. In its place grows the cautious optimism of reasonable people who have begun to define for themselves the limits of globalization and the steps required to protect the social bond from the tyranny of markets.

36

Quoted in Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 171.

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Notes on the contributors and editors

Pierre Anctil obtained his Ph. D. in Social Anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York (1980), and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the Jewish Studies Department of McGill University (1988-1991). He has held several administrative positions in the Quebec government in recent years (19932004), and was subsequently director of the Institute of Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa. He is presently a Killam Fellow, 2008-2010, at the Department of History of the University of Ottawa. Professor Anctil has written several books on the Montreal Jewish community, among which are Le rendezvous manqué, les Juifs de Montréal face au Québec de l’entre-deux-guerres (1988), Tur malka, flâneries sur les cimes de l’histoire juive montréalaise (1997) and Saint-Laurent, Montreal’s Main (2002). He has also translated from Yiddish into French the memoirs of Montreal Jewish writers Israel Medresh, Simon Belkin, Hirsch Wolofsky and Sholem Shtern (1997-2006). He is currently working on a biography of Montreal Yiddish poet Jacob-Isaac Segal. Allan Craigie is a PHD.-student in politics and international relations at the University of Edinburgh, School of Social and Political Studies. His resrach interest includes Federalism, Scottish politics, provincial and federal politics in Canada, multi-level governance and nationalism. Daniel Drache has written and published extensively on globalizaion, WTO and trade governance and the decline of deference in an internet age. He is Full Professor of Political Science and Associate Director Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies. His latest book Defiant Publics: The Unprecedented Reach of the Global Citizen is published by Polity Press, London 2008. Have a look at his home page www.yorku.ca/drache for his many research studies and other publications. Suzanne Gallant is a PhD. student in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Her research interests include questions of pluralism, cultural diversity and the intersection of technology and politics. Dirk Hoerder teaches at Arizona State University, formerly at Universität Bremen 1977-2008, and as visitor at York University, Toronto, Duke University, Durham N.C., Université de Paris 8 -- Saint Denis, and the University of Toronto. His areas of interest are U.S. and Canadian social history and historiogra311

phy, Atlantic economies, global migrations, borderland issues, and sociology of migrant acculturation. His publications include /Cultures in Contact: World Migrations// in the Second Millennium/ (2002), which has received the Social Science History Association's Sharlin Prize, and the coedited /The Historical Practice of Diversity: Transcultural Interactions from the Early Modern Mediterranean to the Postcolonial World/ (2003). Andreas Krebs is a PhD candidate in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He studies contemporary manifestations of colonialism in Canada, and how micropolitical processes work to reinscribe colonialism in the Canadian political landscape. Larissa Lai is currently an Assistant Professor in Canadian Literature at the University of British Columbia. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Calgary and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She is also the author of two novels When Fox Is a Thousand (Press Gang 1995 and Arsenal Pulp 2004) Salt Fish Girl (Thomas Allen 2002) and two poetry books, Sybil Unrest (with Rita Wong) (Line Books 2009) and Automaton Biographies (Arsenal Pulp 2009). Her current critical project, Automatic Bodies: Extra-Human Subjectivities in the Time of Global Capital engages the problem of subject construction under conditions of global flows, rather than state belonging, to understand how subjects are produced under high mobile capital. Christian Lammert is research associate at the Center for North American Studies and teaches poltitical science at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Simon Langlois is a professor of sociology at Laval University (Québec). He works on sociology of consumption and on the sociology of French Canada. He is member of the Royal Society of Canada. Ingrid Makus (Ph.D University of Toronto) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Brock University, Canada. She teaches courses on Liberal Democracy, Philosophy of Law, Canadian Political Thought, and Gender in Political Thought. She has published on various thinkers in the Western tradition of Political Thought, including Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and de Beauvoir. Jiri S. Melich, Ph.D., teaches political science at the Department of Political Science & International Relations, at the Kazakhstan Institute of Management, 312

Economics, and Strategic Research (KIMEP) in Almaty. He researches in the areas of comparative politics & policy and political theory, with focus on the transformation and integration processes in the post-communist Eurasia and the European Union. Bhikhu Parekh. Educated at the Universities of Bombay and London, Lord Bhikhu Parekh is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and of the Academy of the Learned Societies for Social Sciences and a Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Westminster. Lord Parekh was chair of the Runnymede Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (1980-2000), whose report, The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, was published in 2000. He is vice-chairman of the Gandhi Foundation, a trustee of the Anne Frank Educational Trust, and a member of the National Commission on Equal Opportunity. Katja Sarkowsky is junior professor at the University of Augsburg. Her research interests focus on ethnic literatures in Canada and the United States, cultural theory, intersectionality, and the impact of social philosophy on literary and cultural studies. Publications include the monograph AlterNative Spaces: Constructions of Spaces in Contemporary Native American and First Nations’ Literatures (Winter 2007). Robert Sata is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Political Science, Central European University, Budapest Hungary. Dr. Sata specializes in theories of multiculturalism, minority rights, and Europeanization; his most recent research focuses on the socio-political obstacles of European public spheres. Julie Spergel has recently completed her PhD in English Philology at the University of Regensburg in Germany. Her dissertation, “Canada’s ‘Second History’: The Fiction of Jewish Canadian Women Writers,” was awarded a summa cum laude. She has additionally earned a Master of Arts in Intercultural Anglophone Studies (2003) from the University of Bayreuth, also in Germany, and another in Interdisciplinary Studies: Interpretation and Values in the Humanities (2001) from Laurentian University in Sudbury, Canada. Katrin Urschel is a PhD student at the National University of Ireland, Galway, where she teaches Canadian, English and Irish literature. Her dissertation focuses on ethnic identity in Irish-Canadian literature and is funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). She has published articles relating to Ireland, Canada and Transatlantic Studies.

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