| Abstract: |
Minorities' claims for rights increasingly clash with majorities who wish to
retain and defend "national" cultural and religious traditions. Debates around
minarets in Switzerland, burqas in France, Saint Nicolas' companion "Black
Pete" in the Netherlands, and about freedom of speech versus respect for
minorities in several countries are cases in point. Such issues are highly
salient and offer a major mobilization potential for populist parties.
However, while publications about minority rights abound, the normative
literature is remarkably silent on the issue of the normative legitimacy of
rights claims by autochthonous cultural majorities. The reason for this
negligence is the assumption that majorities can, by definition, impose their
will by electoral force. But in the postwar rights regime in which protection
for minority rights has proliferated, there are many situations in which
parliamentary majorities have been trumped by court decisions or obligations
derived from international treaties. Moreover, even if electoral majorities
prevail, this does not solve the normative problem and leads to situations in
which claims of minorities, legitimated by national and supranational minority
protection norms, stand against majorities backed by the electoral power of
numbers but lacking normative legitimacy. The paper argues that it is this
dynamic of "right" versus "might" that is an important structural factor
behind the rise of nationalist populism across Western countries. This
confrontation has a tendency to polarize and to escalate, because there is no
common normative ground on which the legitimacy and limits of majority rights
claims can be negotiated. For one side in such debates, majorities have no
legitimate right whatsoever to claim privileges for their language or culture
over others, for the other side, this right is absolute because in the
populist view democratic legitimacy is reduced to whatever the majority
decides. A normative elaboration of the legitimacy and limits of cultural
majority claims is necessary to escape from this confrontation that
increasingly poisons the political debate in Western democracies. An
additional reason to take cultural majority rights more strongly into
consideration is that the idea that majority cultures are not in need of any
special protection is less and less tenable. In a more and more globalized
world where Anglo-Saxon culture has become the norm in many domains, the
distinction between "dominant" and "minority cultures" can no longer be
exclusively seen as applying to relationships within nation-states, but
increasingly also applies to the unequal balance of power between the cultures
of nation-states. |