American Citizenship and Minority Rights
(2007) Critique: A worldwide journal of politics — Vol. 7, n° 1, p. 43-63 (2007)
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- Is it “un-American” to grant self-government rights1 to national minorities living within the United States? Can such rights destabilize the shared comprehension of American citizenship or create a ‘ripple effect’ and thus weaken the social union? According to some political theorists such as Michael Walzer, the ideal of American citizenship is inconsistent with the granting of self-government rights to American national minorities. Far from being chauvinists, these theorists fear that the acceptance of such rights would lead to political instability. Even though they acknowledge that some groups’ demands for self-government rights have “a good deal of weight,” they think that we should refuse to grant such privileges so as to preserve political unity (Glazer 1983: 119). According to them, only such unity can sustain political stability. I will argue that this position is based on an ambiguous distinction between the diverse minority groups living in the United States and on a narrow comprehension of what they call the national consensus about American citizenship. Refusing to admit the possibility of a shared comprehension of citizenship consistent with self-government rights, these theorists simply reject the latter option. This paper aims to expose some arguments supporting a theoretical approach which does not refuse, before consideration, American national minorities’ access to self-government rights.
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Dostie Proulx, P.-L. (2007). American Citizenship and Minority Rights. Critique: A worldwide journal of politics, 7(1), 43-63. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/180490 (Original work published 2007)