Introductory Paper
by Neal Ascherson

In Israel, Moslem Druse and Palestinian Christians are beating each other up within a Jewish state. In Northern Ireland, where the Catholic minority would still in the main prefer to belong to a different state, Sinn Fein tries to stop people using their individual rights to justice in case that compromises their collective right not to recognise the legitimacy of northern Irish courts and police. In Iraq, where politicians are trying to form a government, Kurds claim a collective right to almost complete autonomy, while the others wonder how this will diminish the individual rights of voters in the rest of the country to choose how the country is governed. In London, a former Home Secretary talks about the need to cultivate and reassert the rights of the English. The English are a majority in the UK, and yet they lack the entrenched political identity – the collective political rights, if you like – now enjoyed under devolution by the minority Scots and Welsh.

Are all these situations about ethnicity? Not so. I read in my paper that 1,500 female National Health Service employees in England have won enormous backdated compensation. This time it is their individual rights to equal treatment which have been violated. A court decided that they had been the victims of illegal pay discrimination on the grounds of their sex for 14 years.

At the heart of what we will be talking about is the difficulty of reconciling individual rights with group rights. Let me offer you an example. During this week, you will see the new film Ae Fond Kiss by Ken Loach. It deals with a subject I know quite well: varieties of group bigotry in the West of Scotland. One of these bigotries is Protestant anti-Catholic prejudice, well known for the violence associated with Celtic and Rangers football games. But don’t imagine that this bigotry is confined to ignorant hooligans. It also exists in smooth, middle-class minds, and it can even be expressed in the language of human rights.

When I was a candidate in the Scottish elections 6 years ago, the first question from the selection committee was: “What’s your position on separate Islamic schools?” This was code, of course. Nobody was planning Moslem schools, and the questioner really meant the separate Roman Catholic schools which, since 1918, have been a fully-funded component of the Scottish educational system. “Surely,” he went on, “true citizenship is a matter of individual human rights on an equal basis for everyone. Isn’t citizenship diminished by special group rights and privileges just for one community? And how can we achieve a tolerant society when sectarianism is handed on from one generation to the next by religious segregation in our schools?”

Plausible, as an abstract bit of reasoning. And yet the subtext was, of course, “Abolish the Catholic schools!”, and the questioner was a dissembling Orangeman. But the example is a good one. The two concepts of individual human rights and of minority or group rights do not mesh naturally together. The first – individual human rights – is a universalising idea. If you are human, you have human rights, and there can be no exceptions. The second , although there has been much theorising in search of a universal ethical grounding for it, is essentially a political invention. It’s not universal but exclusive to members of a group. Collective rights are usually granted as accommodations, in response to the plight or the pressure of a community.

Of course, there have been plenty of attempts to reconcile individual and group rights. The most elementary is the argument that collective rights given to a group are simply the means its members need in order to exercise their individual human rights. In other words, a group right is not a thing in itself, and can’t exist in isolation from individual right. But this is not necessarily how it looks on the ground. The majority, all too often, may look on special rights for a minority as an outrageous privilege bestowed at the expense of the individual citizen’s right to equal treatment.

Let’s look at how the notion of these two kinds of right has developed in recent times. In Tom Hadden’s useful paper, from the pre-conference reading matter, there’s a striking account of how the pendulum has swung between individual and group rights in the past 200 years or so. The 18^th century Enlightenment thought almost exclusively in terms of individual human rights. In the 19^th century, the emphasis shifted towards the collective rights of social classes and of peoples or nations – especially suppressed nations without a state of their own. The problem of minorities was addressed at the end of that century, for example in international treaties affecting the Balkans. Collective minority rights were one of the preoccupations of the Versailles settlement, which entrenched them as a condition for recognising some of the new or restored nations after 1918 – the rights of Jews in Poland, for instance.

After 1945, however, there was a powerful swing back to the idea of individual human rights. Group rights, especially for national minorities, were perceived as one of the causes of the international disorder of the 1930s which had enabled the dictators to push Europe into war. If you look at Germany’s postwar constitution – the 1949 Basic Law – you will find it contains not one single group or minority right. It does allude in the Preamble to one highly controversial group right – the right to self-determination – but only in terms so vague as to amount to little more than rhetoric. (Remember Germany was divided then). The Preamble states that ‘the entire German people are called on to achieve in free self-determination the unity and freedom of Germany’. But the document doesn’t dare to call self-determination a right. Apart from that, every kind of freedom is guaranteed, but always in individual terms. The very idea of collective rights within a society is mentioned only obliquely. For example, Article II/2 on the Rights of Liberty states that ‘everyone shall have the right to the free development of his (sic) personality insofar as he does not violate the rights of others…’ (my italics).

The same insistence on individual rights permeated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms in 1950. There were general bans on discrimination against groups on grounds of race, religion, language and so on, but these fell short of any positive assertion of group rights. As far as immigration into Europe and North America were concerned, this was the period of the melting-pot. It was assumed that immigrant communities and ethnic minorities would slowly lose their identity and should be helped to merge into the majority national culture.

This was also the period in which most of the overseas colonial empires were overthrown. The national liberation movements talked constantly about the collective right to self-determination, and new constitutions often entrenched individual rights in the fashion of the time. But these new regimes showed almost no interest in minority rights. They were not prepared to re-draw the colonial frontiers in the interests of reuniting divided communities, they suspected that local or regional autonomy might lead to secession and war, and they tended to regard ethnic diversity as a threat.

But in the last decades of the 20^th century, priorities swung back once again towards the group. Regional and national minorities, mostly in Europe but also in Asia and Africa, began to call not only for self-government or independence under the supposed right of self-determination., but for collective rights for minority cultures and languages. In a paper for a recent seminar of this Trust, Professor Will Kymlicka listed five ways in which western democracies learned in this period to manage ethnic minorities. Assimilation gave way to multiculturalism. Autonomy was granted to national minorities, which would once have been seen as a threat to the cohesion of the state (see Scotland, Wales, Catalunya, Euzkadi, even the Sorbs in East Germany). European governments slowly accepted that refugees, asylum-seekers and even overstaying contract workers would stay in the host country and had a strong claim to citizenship. In many post-colonial democracies, white-dominated but with aboriginal and indigenous populations, policy has slowly moved away from forced assimilation towards recognising the rights of ‘First Peoples’ and even their collective title to lands which had been seized from them. Finally, Kymlicka pointed out that – especially in America – passive non-discrimination against Afro-Americans had given way to ‘affirmative action’ – clearly a collective right which could be held to impact on individual rights to equality.

Empowering a group by giving it special rights often reveals a minority within a minority. The coming of Welsh-medium schools revealed Anglophone parents in Welsh-speaking areas who protested that the human rights of their children were being violated by compulsory teaching in an alien language. The movement of Québec towards sovereignty or independence provoked strong resistance from Québec’s aboriginal peoples – not so much because they loved a united Canada and distrusted the Québecois, but because independence would partition their traditional territories and divide them from their kin in other provinces.

How, then, do we manage these misfits? In pre-democratic times, managing a multi-ethnic society was relatively easy. The kings of Poland invited foreign minorities into the country – Jews, Scots, Germans, Armenians – and gave them group rights and internal autonomy, in order to extract services and taxation from them. Ethnic conflicts were suppressed with impartial brutality.

Polish multiculturalism was a planned artefact. Ottoman Turkish multiculturalism , in contrast, managed the pre-existing ethnicities and religions the Turks found in conquered territories. Here again, though, the millet system gave each community some collective rights to internal self-rule and cultural independence.

Why has it become so much harder? Democracy is the answer. Democracy, that negligent beauty who leaves everything in her room so untidy, makes that sort of solution impossible. This is in part because democracy has traditionally associated the exercise of human rights with the volonté de tous – the will of the majority. So-called ‘difference-blind’ institutions are in fact usually tilted towards the majority view. That was the problem in Canada when – to the amazement and distress of most Canadians – Trudeau’s ‘Charter of Rights and Freedoms’, offering equal rights to all Canadians, was repudiated by both Québecois and the First Nation peoples as an assimilationist trick.

What happens if the will of the majority and of the minority are inflexibly opposed? I remember editorial conferences at The Observer, in the early years of the Irish Troubles. Older members of the staff insisted that a ‘moderate majority’ simply must exist in Northern Ireland (if only it could be persuaded to emerge) which would accept that the human rights of the minority should be recognised. In vain, the Belfast correspondent repeated that no moderate majority existed – the opinions of most people on both sides were extreme. This was – in some ways, still is – a situation in which every recognition of the individual rights of one group seemed to threaten the collective rights of the other. And I remember a NATO airfield in southern Germany in the 1980s, occupied by 3000 intellectuals protesting against the deployment of cruise and Pershing missiles. Someone proposed that the demonstrators should move their blockade to another part of the airfield. Debate began. But in order to ensure that nobody’s individual rights were crushed by Mehrheitsterror (terrorism by majority), the meeting had to go on until every single person present was in agreement with the proposition. It took many hours to achieve what was called Konsenz, or unanimity. Here was a fascinating, if clumsy, effort to avoid the democratic problem of reconciling group and individual rights by compromise. A collective decision had been transformed into the sum of all its component individual decisions. Neither individual nor group had been required to surrender.

The mention of Northern Ireland, in the context of majorities and minorities, leads me to the most urgent complex of human rights which confronts most governments. This is treating a minority in such a way that the majority does not feel that it is being deprived of its own rights to equal treatment, and – perhaps equally important – that the minority does not feel that it is being merely tolerated rather than actively included.

These are the policies of multiculturalism. Northern Ireland illustrates some of the problems of those policies in an extreme form. Here two mutually suspicious communities live side by side. Their power to harm each other is so great that the concepts of majority and minority have proved almost useless in deciding what should be done. Reformers in recent decades have tried to depoliticise the antagonism, suggesting that this is a matter of two cultural traditions which – if they can abandon their respective loyalty to Dublin or to London – might one day come to respect and even celebrate each other’s customs and festivals. A precondition is that there should be no hegemonic culture in the land: neither Republicanism nor Unionism. Far-sighted in many ways, the problem with this vision is that the identity of one cultural tradition – so-called ‘Loyalist’ Unionism – is expressed by celebrating its dominance over the other.

More commonly, multiculturalism has arisen in western Europe and North America as a response to immigration – above all, immigration from Africa, the Caribbean and Asia. Nowhere has it been more enthusiastically adopted than in Britain. And yet nowhere has it been so heavily criticised.

As an ideal, it still dominates political discourse. If there is to be a gleaming city on a hill, then – in the age of human rights and mass migrations – it is held to be a city in which many ethnic communities live peacefully side by side. There, these communities will cultivate their own cultural identity under an overarching British (or French or German) political identity. In this perspective, the old melting-pot assimilationist image of a national future is being replaced by the ‘salad bowl’ metaphor: a healthy, crunchy mix of contrasts.

This sort of multiculturalism was supposed to embody a decisive move away from the politics of ethnicity. But it does not. Multicultural policies are still contained within the concept of ethnicity.

It is true that they abandon the old goal of assimilation, the idea that ethnicity politics can only mean an enforced monopoly of power and culture, held by one ethnic group which obliges all the others to adapt to it. But what is now being said, in effect, is that ethnic nationalisms can be tamed by a sort of equal-rights proclamation. It’s assumed, in a well-meaning way, that it’s bad to claim that only one ethnic self-assertion – my own – is valid. So instead it must be right to say that all ethnic nationalisms are born equal and are as good as each other!

Perhaps it’s wiser to say that multiculturalism is not so much a programme as a way of rationalising what is happening or has already happened. And much of what is happening – in some big British cities, for example – is encouraging. With some terrifying fits and starts, people of different colours, religions, origins are living together with increasing intimacy and enjoying the experience.

It should be said, though, that in some countries multiculturalism can be seen as a step backwards. In Bosnia, its advent looks like an admission of defeat. There, people of different backgrounds have tried but failed to live in a single yet diverse society with a single code of rights for all. A Bosnian writer lamented last year: ‘The term…implies the mutual incompatibility of different cultures within the nation-state, with “culture”, in fact, representing a euphemism for racial – or racial and confessional – identity…this model has nothing to do with the single-culture model, the model of joint existence we had in Bosnia-Hercegovina before 1992…the doctrine of multiculturalism means that these identities have first to be physically separated, then mechanically arranged alongside each other regardless of the fact that through a centuries-long practice they have demonstrated not only their mutual compatibility, but also their capacity for creative mutual interaction’.

Perhaps the most important warning to be made about multiculturalism is that it is not a permanent condition. The impact of migration into elderly industrial societies is enormous, dynamic and will go on producing transformations. Multiculturalism is separated by a long journey from the old ideal of benevolent absorption – ‘they’ll all become black Britishers’. But it is not the destination, or the end of that journey. It will prove in turn to be only a way-station along the track to something else.

That on-going process or movement can be hard to discern. In part, this is because some superficial aspects of multiculturalism suggest a slowing-down, if not a halt, to change. Many commentators have noticed that multiculturalism, as it exists in British cities, tends to enfranchise the conservative and traditionalist elements in a group. The elders take charge, and quite naturally they enforce the religious and cultural orthodoxies which seem to them vital if the group’s identity is to be preserved. It can happen that the cultural discipline demanded in diaspora communities grows more rigid and restrctive than in the ‘homeland’.

One of the reasons I like Loach’s film so much is that it illustrates this point. When multiculturalism becomes institutionalised, formally (as in the case of Catholic schools in Glasgow with Church control over staffing and teaching), or informally in the case of the film’s Glasgow Moslem family, repressive and exclusive tendencies take over. But, as the film shows, this in turn produces recurrent and often agonising conflict as the young of these communities try to escape or at least come to their own terms with the ‘bigger’ society around them.

In the long term, this is a battle the elders of multiculturalism cannot win. But in the short term, their authority may actually be reinforced by conflicts between individual and group rights. British majority opinion regards female consent to marriage, for example, as the exercise of a basic human right. Traditional Moslem, – and not only Moslem – groups sometimes do not. (We should remember the distinction here between arranged marriage and forced marriage, something which British activists easily overlook). Such groups may regard an attempt to hinder arranged marriages as a threat to the family, and thus to the whole community, which will then mobilise in defence of its collective right to cultural autonomy. There are many such examples. They range from the Hijab controversy in French state schools to the extreme of female circumcision (genital mutilation): something firmly part of the socialisation process in some groups but equally firmly intolerable to majority opinion in Europe and America.

One problem with the language of rights is that it is static. A right may seem to exist independent of time or space. In practice, apparently insoluble conflicts of group and individual rights are often softened and then washed away by change. People who live together tend to integrate, which is not the same as ‘assimilate’. After multiculturalism comes hybridity, as majority and minority slowly engender a third, in many respects new culture. That synthesis is already visible in a megalopolis like London. Professor Tariq Modood of Bristol has written in a recent paper that we should recognise different types of multi-culture: “a mixing and style-setting hybridity [more easily entered by Afro-Caribbeans] and an ethno-religious communitarian development [here Modood evidently has Asian Moslems in mind]”.

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