Minority Rights: Between Diversity and Community

Key Concepts (Polity)

by Jennifer Jackson Preece

The question of minority rights is one of the great dilemmas of contemporary politics. Increases in the flow of immigrants, migrants and refugees have raised public concerns that greater cultural and ethnic diversity creates instability within nation-states. But does stability really require homogeneity? Or can it be maintained in the presence of different minority groups?

In this path-breaking book, Jackson Preece analyses whether traditional minority rights theory is sufficiently dynamic to inform effective responses to modern challenges. The central premise behind minority rights is that groups recognized and supported by the political community are far less likely to challenge its authority or threaten its territorial integrity. However, as Jackson Preece shows, the potential for collisions of values and interests still exists, and the possibility of a permanent solution to the problem of diversity remains illusive.
Minority Rights will be an indispensable resource for students and scholars of political science, international relations, law, and sociology.

Genres: Politics

196 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2005

Reviews

[Eitental · Rating 3 out of 5]

This work is well-written in clear prose, is full of interesting information and provides some useful introduction to the field of minority rights. The central thesis, that a particular minority group is most “problematic” when the group’s nature threatens the ideological basis of the political community where it resides (e.g. a religious minority is a problem when religion is a defining factor of the political community), is certainly a very intelligent and enlightening one. Unfortunately, the work is prevented from being really great by a lack of thematic focus.

The main body of the book is divided into four chapters, each dealing with a particular type of identity: religious, racial, linguistic and ethnic. Each chapter comprises of two basic halves: the first section gives a historic overview of the political salience of that particular identity, from the Middle Ages up to WW2, while the second section explains the various policies developed by international society and promoters of multiculturalism and minority rights to deal with issues surrounding this particular type of minority. The latter section of each chapter is generally spot-on, providing overview of different responses to minorities and intelligent, balanced discussion of such controversial issues as whether minorities have the right to secession or self-determination, the debate of equal treatment (e.g. “colour blindness”) versus positive discrimination and the tension between universal freedom of religion (including freedom to choose, change or renounce ones religion) and protection of groups’ traditional religions from proselytising and other external influence.

The first parts of each chapter are however less consistent. They are usually very interesting and often making great points, with highlights including an analysis of treatment of religious minorities in mediæval Christendom; a description of the origins of the concept of race, racial theories and social Darwinism; an explanation of the different attitudes to minority languages by civic and ethnic nationalists (the former viewing them as a burden to mass participation in public life, the latter as a sign that they simply do not belong to the nation) and the explanation that European colonial empires did not attempt to linguistically assimilate subject peoples as they had no intention of including them in the political community. However, these sections have a tendency to go off at somewhat irrelevant tangents. It is certainly invaluable to include analysis of the situations of minorities in historical political communities, but the main problem is that Jackson Preece repeatedly goes into a great deal of detail explaining exactly how and why a given type of minority was or wasn’t problematic at a given place and time, including a detailed explanation and analysis of the structure of the political community. I want to emphasize that these explanations are very well-written and mostly very interesting (I particularly like Jackson Preece’s succinct description of Smith’s “ethnic nation” and “civic nation” or Meinecke’s “Kulturnation” and “Staatsnation” as “community of putative descent” and “community of putative consent”), but the problem is that this is supposed to be a book about minority rights and it often feels more like a general work on nationalism. If you have already read the likes of Anthony Smith and Benedict Anderson, much of this material will be familiar. Moreover, the same basic ideas about nationalism and popular sovereignty are repeated throughout the book. It is for example a little bit tedious to read the same basic arguments being made in the race, language and ethnicity chapters about how the aforementioned factors were essentially irrelevant in mediæval and early modern Europe until the advent of the idea of popular sovereignty. As ethnic identity is primarily defined by language, race and, to a lesser extent, religion, the chapter on ethnicity in particular repeats much of what has already been said, with the section about ethnicity in European overseas empires repeating almost verbatim material from the race chapter. Other only tenuously relevant digressions include a section on inequality between developed and developing countries and an etymological investigation of the word “race” that finds that its cognate was used by some in the Middle Ages to refer to what we now call “class”.

Another major shortcoming of the book is the lack of breadth of case studies. The race chapter uses the relevant and interesting examples of Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa, European colonial empires, segregation in the American South and the American treatment of indigenous peoples, but most of the other chapters restrict themselves to looking at mediæval and early modern Europe, with the occasional reference to the Ottoman Empire, the Roman Empire and Ancient Greece. I feel that the book could have benefitted greatly from analysis of the minorities policies of explicitly non-national Communist states (e.g. USSR, PRC, Yugoslavia), multi-ethnic post-colonial states (e.g. India, Indonesia, most of Africa), modern theocracies (e.g. Iran, Saudi Arabia) and pre-modern non-European civilizations (e.g. India, China, Mayans, Aztecs, Mongol Empire, Ancient Egypt). This is not to say that I expected Jackson Preece to mention every conceivable civilization – I appreciate that this work is just intended as a brief introduction – but it seems that in many instances potentially very relevant and interesting cases are omitted and that breadth of scope was sacrificed in the name of unnecessary depth of analysis of mediæval Europe. This lack of perspective leads to claims such as “the potential for religious diversity dilemmas is probably as old as human community itself” without any examination of interfaith relations in non-Abrahamic societies (in particular, I think of the historic coexistence of different religious traditions in China and Japan).

The introduction provides an excellent reflection on what exactly constitutes a minority group (settling on the definition of a group that is not fully included within a political community), explains “the problem of minorities” (the fact that minority groups call into question the ideological basis of a political community’s legitimacy) and outlines the historical developments in the discourse around minority rights. The brief conclusion restates the central argument, as it has been repeatedly postulated throughout the book, but adds the pessimistic proviso that even in a multicultural political community that respects and values diversity and minority rights, there will inevitable be some clash between the values of “diversity” (freedom) and “community” (belonging). Two invaluable appendices provide the full text of the UN’s Declarations on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities and a list of other key documents, with web addresses where they can be found.

In summary, this work does provide a lot of useful information about the history of minority rights and current debates and controversies in the field, and it makes a compelling argument about fates of minorities depending upon the ideological basis of political communities, but ultimately the book suffers from a lack of focus, repetition of the same ideas, misplaced emphasis on defining different types of national and pre-national political communities and a lack of examples from beyond the Western world.