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This chapter introduces a new framework for testing the recognition/redistribution hypothesis. It develops an index of twenty-three different types of MCPs that have been adopted for three different types of minority groups (immigrants, national minorities, and indigenous peoples). Western countries are then categorized in terms of their level of MCPs. Whether countries with higher levels of MCPs have faced an erosion of the welfare state as compared to countries with lower levels of MCPs is tested. It is shown that there is no negative correlation between the strength of a country's commitment to MCPs and its ability to sustain welfare spending or economic redistribution. The chapter also examines the heterogeneity/redistribution hypothesis, and shows that this too is overstated. In general, the size of immigrant groups, national minorities, and indigenous peoples in Western countries does not affect a country's ability to sustain its welfare commitments, although a rapid change in the size of immigrant groups does seem to have an effect. Yet even here, the authors of this chapter argue, there are hints that adopting MCPs can help to mitigate whatever negative effect a rapidly increasing immigrant population may have.

This chapter considers whether the accommodation of national minorities through the according of self-government at the regional level undermines the welfare state. Most Western states with sizeable national minorities have accommodated minority nationalist aspirations through some form of federal or quasi-federal territorial autonomy. This chapter examines the impact of this sort of devolution or regionalization on the welfare state in the UK, Belgium, and Canada. The chapter concludes that such institutional reforms have had complex effects on social policy, both at the central level and in the self-governing regions. It has set in play political dynamics that sometimes work to strengthen social policy as a tool of nation-building, and sometimes serve to inhibit new redistributive policies. As a result, no simple general patterns leap out, challenging assertions that accommodating substate nationalism inevitably weakens the welfare state.

The essays in Part III of the book, on liberal constraints and traditionalist education, argue for a more regulatory conception of liberal education and emphasize the need for some controls over cultural and religious educational authority. Kevin McDonough’s essay, on multinational civic education, develops a conception of this that allows for both federal and minority national groups to reinforce conditional civic attachments. This ‘conditionalist’ view of civic education is necessary in multinational federal societies, he argues, because appeals to one set of national attachments may exacerbate rather than alleviate particular injustices in particular circumstances. For example, McDonough argues that when aboriginal women and children are the victims of injustice at the hands of tribal institutions and leaders, they must be able to appeal to their fellow non-aboriginal citizens and federal institutions for assistance, although this is not possible unless citizens – aboriginal and otherwise – have come to regard attachments to the minority nation as conditional rather than absolute. Similarly, citizens whose primary identification is to the federal society must be able to recognize that some of their fellow citizens legitimately have a minority nation as the object of their primary loyalty – otherwise, efforts to support federal intervention in minority national affairs will be vulnerable to forces of cultural insensitivity and arrogance, rather than of liberal justice.

Focuses on Will Kymlicka's Multicultural Citizenship. Applauds the work's path‐breaking attention to actual practices of group recognition in liberal democratic societies but criticizes its reliance on the concept of ‘societal culture’ to articulate a theoretical justification for these practices. It argues that this concept undermines the moral claims of immigrants and of small, vulnerable national minorities and generates a monocultural understanding of citizenship rather than a multicultural one. It contends that the concept of justice as evenhandedness provides a better guide for multiculturalism than the concept of societal culture and uses an extended discussion of language policy to illustrate the claim.

This chapter reviews the book “Indigenous Peoples in International Law” by James Anaya. The book explores the theory that indigenous peoples are a distinct category, and should not be classified under the heading of national minorities. It is argued that this theory conflicts with the realities of international law and the self-understandings of many defenders of indigenous rights. It also appears to justify only transnational rather than permanent differences in the rights of indigenous peoples and stateless nations.

This paper examines the nature of the state, national security, and the identification of a national minority in the post-Soviet context. It contends that the assumption that post-Soviet states function in the same way as other European states is unwarranted. It then looks at the specific example of the Crimean Tatars.

After 1945, national minority rights lost their hitherto independent standing in international relations and were subsumed within the newly created universal human rights regime. The failure of the League of Nations discredited national minority rights and the minorities themselves tended to be viewed with suspicion owing to the wartime complicity of certain national minority leaders with Nazi aims in Central and Eastern Europe — though it should also be pointed out that these aims cleverly exploited national minority fears and aspirations within the region. Consequently, unlike in previous eras, national minority rights were considered contrary to international peace and security. The inter-war system of national minority guarantees was not resurrected and no new national minority rights provisions were included in the various agreements of the 1940s and 1950s which laid the foundations of the Cold War human rights regime. This chapter examines the various political calculations and normative assumptions which underlay the Cold War universal human rights regime that gave such short shrift to the particular problems of national minorities.

The essays in Part III of the book, on liberal constraints and traditionalist education, argue for a more regulatory conception of liberal education and emphasize the need for some controls over cultural and religious educational authority. Rob Reich’s essay, on multicultural accommodations in education, proposes that the liberal state needs to rethink its commitment to cultural groups whose educational agendas advance the integrity of the group over and against the freedom and equality of its members, and that thus educate in ways that place strict limits on the autonomy and critical thinking skills of their members. He aims to examine two prominent defenses of multiculturalism, showing how each pays insufficient attention to the tension between cultural groups: Avishai Margalit and Moshe Halbertal argue that, because individuals have a ‘right to culture’, the state must grant groups a status that may flout the rights of some individuals, conditioned on the ability of those individuals to exit; Will Kymlicka, in a far more sophisticated version of multiculturalism, defends cultural rights, and accommodations, but only for those cultural groups that are themselves internally liberal (except in rare circumstances) and that take seriously the value of personal autonomy. Reich contends that, while the freedom to exit from a group is important, the group rights supported by Margalit and Halbertal may serve to disable or severely impoverish the ability of children to exit from groups; further, he contends that, while personal autonomy is important, Kymlicka’s conception of autonomy is unsatisfactory and, moreover, his defense of rights to separate schooling for national minorities and to educational exemptions for some polyethnic groups leaves him open to the same critique about exit that Reich levies against Margalit and Halbertal. Along the way, Reich comments on the odd fixation of multiculturalists on rights of exit.

The fundamental dilemma in recognising national minority rights — whether post-1919, post-1945, or post-1989 — concerns that gap which continues to exist between those principles of order that affirm the territorial integrity and sovereignty of existing states and those principles of legitimacy that affirm the right of all nations to independent statehood. The main public policy problem in adopting international standards of national minority rights has unavoidably centred upon the need to determine whose rights — those of states, national minorities, or individuals — should have priority in any given situation where they might come into conflict. This chapter assesses the extent to which these European initiatives of the period 1990–1995 enlarged upon previous international requirements for state conduct towards national minorities. The focus is on whether the measures adopted accorded priority to the rights of states or to the rights of national minorities, and why.

The great powers’ response to the events of 1875–1878 established a standard of treatment that was later applied to those new nation-states which emerged out of the defeated Ottoman Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Prussian Kingdom in Central and Eastern Europe after 1919. These successor states were unavoidably ethnographically diverse despite the fact that national self-determination was publicly avowed as the wellspring of their legitimacy. This chapter examines the League of Nations system of minority guarantees as a precursor of post-Cold War efforts to protect national minorities in Central and Eastern Europe, focusing on the origins of this inter-war system, the content of its national minority guarantees, the manner in which the League’s guarantee functioned, the attitude of treaty-bund states, great powers, and the minorities themselves to this system, and its overall efficacy in protecting them.

This chapter turns to the problem of self-government rights. To what extent do national minorities have a legitimate claim on some form of self-governing autonomy within a multinational state? When, if ever, does this claim—or its frustration—support a further claim to independent statehood? By drawing on the idea of equal recognition, the chapter develops a distinctive way of thinking about the justification of multinational federalism and other forms of autonomy for substate national groups. It explores this issue in the context of a further question that has been debated by normative political theorists in recent years—the moral status of secessionist claims. The two main views on this question have been the plebiscitary theory and the remedial rights only theory. The chapter charts a middle course between the democratic approach to secession, on the one hand, and the remedial approach, as formulated by Buchanan, on the other.

This chapter considers a working definition of national minority that is well suited to a study focused on the tension between minority rights and sovereign state rights and written in the international society tradition. This objective is pursued in two ways: by surveying the history of how international organisations concerned with minority questions have sought — and as of 1995 failed — to establish a common definition of the term ‘minority’, and by evaluating the various meanings adopted by some of the leading academic commentators on the subject of minority rights. In particular, the kind of criteria these definitions employ is discussed, whether it is objective criteria such as distinctions of race, language, ethnicity, or religion, or alternatively, whether it is subjective distinctions such as group self-identification as a minority. This chapter also explores the relationship between the concept of a minority and the broader and more familiar idea of a nation with a corresponding right to self-determination.

This chapter explores why national minorities should be a subject of international relations when this field is primarily concerned with states and not groups or individuals within a state’s domestic jurisdiction. If statesmen and stateswomen demonstrated no concern for such groups in their foreign policies, then national minorities certainly would not be an appropriate subject for a book on international politics, though they would still be suitable for studies of domestic governance or constitutional law or political sociology, among others. However, such international indifference towards minorities does not exist: in practice, the foreign relations of many countries both today and in the past have been concerned with national minorities. This is because although the modern theory of state sovereignty postulates a neat fit between international boundaries and politically significant identities, in reality the two rarely coincide.

By the mid-1990s, international society had come to include, alongside those traditional rights which states could claim against one another, a growing number of human and national minority rights men and women could claim against states. However, these humanitarian principles remained subordinate to the preservation of international order defined in statist terms — equal sovereignty, non-intervention, inviolability of borders, etc. National minority rights were acceptable only in so far as they encouraged democratisation in post-communist states, ameliorated national minority/majority tensions, reduced migration to kin-states, and improved bilateral relations between kin-states and those states where their kin-minority resided. Attempting to get the balance correct was the main challenge confronting both the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Council of Europe in their efforts to enforce the emerging European standard of state conduct towards national minorities between 1990 and 1995. This chapter describes and evaluates the various mechanisms of national minority rights enforcement in Europe at that time.

This book shows that national minority rights have always been subservient to national interest and security within states, and to international peace and stability within the society of states. In other words, state sovereignty — the organising principle within and between states — is the trump card in the minority rights game. To summarise the argument which supports this claim, this chapter considers the three questions which were raised in the introduction: why national minorities and considerations regarding their status — which, as substate groups, would initially appear to be subjects of domestic rather than international politics — are recurring features of European treaties, conferences, and organisations from 1919 onwards; how, and more importantly, why has the formulation of minority rights changed over time; what these changes suggest about the theory and practice of Europe’s nation-states system.

This chapter examines the post-1989 discourse on national minority and co-nation rights. It suggests that the foundation of the problem of national minorities in international law is found not in the issue of a definition but in the relation between national minorities and state nationalism. The chapter argues that in order to elucidate the problematic relationship between protection and national self-determination, one must problematise the discourse of national minority rights not solely in terms of international law, but also in terms of social idealism.

This chapter places the issue of minority rights in the wider legal and theoretical context of rights and classifies them as political rights. Drawing on the experience of Central and Eastern Europe, it then analyses the politics involved regarding the rights of national minorities. Constitutionally enshrined rights are both a traditional safeguard against the arbitrary use of power and the foundation for participation in a polity. Rights that are enforceable reflect the values on which a political system is founded. The notion of rights has become more elaborate and differentiated over time. In T. H. Marshall's classic study ‘Citizenship and Social Class’, social rights were not necessarily tied to citizenship, a political and economic reality that still holds today.

Overseas Chinese communities and national minority groups are an odd place to look for answers to the question “Who is China?” But the chapter explains that these essential outsiders show how the party‐state works both at the local level and in transnational space to recruit domestic strangers (i.e., national minorities) and foreign brothers (i.e. overseas Chinese) into its national project. The chapter shows how they emerged as political groups just as Chinese nationalism itself was taking shape in the early twentieth century. The Chinese state certainly created these categories as a way to recruit outsiders in the Chinese nation. But chapter shows that outsiders also define the inside: the “barbaric” national minorities define Chinese civilization, while the modern capitalist civilization of overseas Chinese provides the goal for China's development project. Nationalities work and overseas Chinese work thus reinvoke and reinterpret China's enduring civilization – barbarian distinction to construct the Han as the majority race of the Chinese nation.