Diversity and the Liberal State Introduction

The articles contained in this issue are the proceedings of a joint workshop organized by Centre for the Study of Equality and Multiculturalism (CESEM) and Centre de Recherche en Éthique de l’Université de Montréal (CRÉUM) that took place in June 2010 at the University of Copenhagen. The idea behind the workshop was that most de facto multicultural countries face to some extent the same issues regarding diversity management, especially as regards cultural and religious affairs. And it is interesting to compare experiences and thoughts from North America and Europe and especially Canada and Denmark, where Canada is known for embracing multicultural policies and Denmark for firmly rejecting them. In recent years, Canada has had several intense debates on topics as various as the proposed introduction of the so-called ‘Sharia tribunals’ in Ontario and the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on reasonable accommodation in Quebec. Similarly, Denmark has experienced debates over e.g. mother-tongue instruction and religious symbols worn by judges, where Nils Holtug discusses the latter in the present issue. But such questions are not specific to Denmark and Canada. Recurrent debates on religious symbols in public schools and space have taken place in France over the last years. Germany has had a similar debate on the wearing of such symbols by school teachers. In the United States, various debates have concerned the right for members of police and army forces to wear religious symbols, the right for parents from certain religious groups to prematurely remove their children from schools or from courses they consider incompatible with their faith. All these examples touch upon the issue of how to accommodate diversity in liberal institutions. All demonstrate the salience of the management of religious diversity in liberal democracies. Issues of diversity and the liberal state are not limited to religion though. Even if liberal institutions emerged as an answer to discontent and wars fuelled by religious diversity, the questions at hand cannot be limited to this sole dimension. Diversity management in the liberal state concerns a broad array of issues. For instance, Canada and Denmark have indigenous peoples who have put forward claims for self-government. And even if one may argue that the issue of diversity is more visible in some countries due to their distinct histories, it is present everywhere. Religious, ethnic, linguistic, moral and national diversity is the common lot of all countries. This does not mean that all these forms of diversity foster strictly identical questions. For example, demands that emanate from indigenous peoples and national minorities sometimes have profound constitutional implications, in terms of e.g. secession or political autonomy, which is seldom the case for migrant minorities. Despite these particularities, there is a general set of questions that unites them, namely: how far should institutions in liberal countries go to accommodate difference? How do their (proclaimed) liberal commitments interact with demands for accommodating diversity, when such accommodation implies e.g. exemptions from common regulation, specific rights and social norms? By way of illustration, Morten Ebbe Juul Nielsen inquires about the normative dimensions of cases where several legal orders are to cohabit the same territory. As pointed out above, the liberal state has emerged as a solution to the issue of diversity. Of particular concern here is the principle of neutrality, i.e. the claim that institutions should remain neutral with respect to different conceptions of the good. This principle has received various formulations that, more or less, share the same basic idea that the state should abstain from favoring or handicapping specific cultural, moral, religious or ethnic groups. A second, related, principle that also forms the basis of the liberal position since John …