United in Difference: Overcoming the Impasse Between Unity and Diversity
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United in difference: Overcoming the impasse between unity and diversity Erica J. Rayment Department of Political Science McGill University, Montreal March 2010 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts © Erica J. 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Acknowledgements I would like to thank Jacob Levy for his support and supervision of this project – his patience, generosity and encouragement were invaluable to me. I would also like to thank Arash Abizadeh and Hudson Meadwell for their feedback and comments on the proposal of this project. I am grateful to the Montreal Groupe de Recherche Interuniversitaire en Philosophie Politique for fellowship support throughout my degree and especially to those who attended the January 29, 2010 meeting of GRIPP, at which I presented an earlier draft of the first chapter of this project for their feedback, comments and suggestions. Finally I would like to thank Safia Haq for her creative help coming up with a title for the project and Shadia El Dardiry for proofreading the French abstract. 1 Abstract This thesis is concerned with the tension between unity and difference in contemporary political theory. It argues that this tension can be resolved by understanding unity and difference in their political and institutional context rather than in isolated abstraction. The first section examines some existing responses to the challenge of diversity, and suggests that the incompatibility of unity and difference is grounded in a misconception of how we should approach and understand each of the concepts. The second section seeks to ground the compatibility of unity and difference in a diverse and inclusive communicative public sphere. Unity, conceived as the product of political cooperation, in fact relies upon engagement with difference, understood as fluid and relational. The third section shows how the compatibility between unity and diversity proposed in the second chapter can ground alternate institutional and policy opportunities for the integration and accommodation of religious minorities, looking at the examples of France, the Netherlands and Quebec. Ce mémoire traite la tension entre l’unité et la diversité dans la théorie politique contemporaine. Elle postule qu’une résolution à cette tension peut être atteinte si l’on considère l’unité et la différence dans leur contexte politique et institutionnel, et non dans une abstraction isolée. La première section examine des réponses au défi posé par la diversité et suggère que l’incompatibilité entre l’unité et la différence est fondée dans une mécompréhension de comment on devrait approcher et considérer chacun des concepts. La deuxième section cherche à fonder la compatibilité de l’unité et la différence dans une sphère publique inclusive, communicative et hétérogène. L’unité, conçue comme produit de la coopération politique, dépend sur la participation avec la différence, conçue comme étant fluide et relationnelle. La troisième section indique comment la compatibilité entre l’unité et la différence développée dans le deuxième chapitre peut créer des opportunités institutionnelles et politiques alternatives pour l’intégration et l’accommodement des minorités religieuses, examinant les exemples de la France, des Pays Bas et du Québec. 2 Contents Introduction 4 Chapter 1: The Impasse of Contemporary Theory 8 Chapter 2: Breaking the Impasse 32 Chapter 3: Testing and Applying the Solution 59 Conclusion 85 Bibliography 88 3 Introduction Since the Protestant Reformation and the subsequent Wars of Religion in sixteenth and seventeenthcentury Europe, questions about the rights, obligations and social roles of religious minorities in political society have raised pressing political and philosophical concerns. These concerns about the role of religious minorities remain no less relevant in contemporary western democracies, although the religious pluralism in our current political context is notably more diverse and runs much deeper than that of early modern Europe. Contemporary religious diversity is also very often intertwined with questions of culture, race and ethnicity within the broader context of the multicultural society.1 In our current context, the political pressures created by the fact of religious diversity are very much real and urgent. Cases such as the controversy over Shari’a courts in Ontario, the headscarf law in France, the murder of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands, and the widespread crisis of reasonable accommodation in Quebec all place cultural and religious minorities (very often Muslims) and the state in direct confrontation with one another and call into question popular assumptions about fundamental political concepts such as equality, democracy and citizenship in the face of plurality. These kinds of cases draw our attention to the need for a coherent theoretical framework according to which they can be understood and negotiated. This project will seek to establish such a frameworK by grounding the compatibility of unity and diversity 1 The primary object of my inquiry is the treatment of religious diversity in political communities, but in contemporary political life, religious identity is invariably tied up with other questions of culture, ethnicity, and immigration and it would be impossible to treat the issue of religious diversity in isolation (see Levey 2009). Throughout this project, therefore, I will deal with broader more general theorizations of diversity and integration, but remain ultimately motivated by the question of the place of religious minorities in contemporary political communities. 4 within an inclusive political communication and practice. Many existing approaches to diversity fall short. The complete isolation of and social fragmentation among religious and cultural groups that might result from a thoroughgoing politics of difference would be undesirable, but at the same time so too would be an insistence upon assimilation or homogenization and the abandonment of religious and cultural identity, motivated by a desire to ensure social unity within the political community. Given these two extremes, the challenge of establishing a framework according to which diversity can be negotiated is fundamentally related to the tension between the protection of difference and the maintenance of unity in a plural society – both are desirable ends, but it is not clear how both can be simultaneously maintained, given what each seems to require.2 James Bohman articulates the nature of this tension by noting that On one hand, the segmentation of distinct political jurisdictions […] without overarching common constitutional essentials and rights might sustain a semblance of political unity, but at the cost of disparate cultural communities that deliberate alongside of rather than with each other. On the other hand, not to recognize distinct cultural rights leads to forced integration and unity at the price of diversity.3 Given this, he suggests, it follows that “there is a clear tradeoff between unity and plurality, and the unity of the larger groups clearly conflicts with the plurality and integrity of smaller cultural groups.”4 There is thus a need to move beyond this tension 2 A more rigorous distinction is sometimes made between diversity and difference, but for the purposes of this project I will generally use the term diversity to refer to the more widespread fact of plurality that exists within a political community and the term difference to refer more specifically to the identity or particularity of minority cultural or religious groups. 3 James Bohman,