Ewald Engelen
email: e.r.engelen@uva.nl

Riva Kastoryano

Contested Citizenship

This book is a systematic and solid cross-national comparative analysis in the

enough multiculturalism in the Netherlands. The lesson could just as well be that the combination of enforced cultural assimilation, as is the course the Dutch have taken since the rise and fall of Pim Fortuyn in 2002, and malign neglect in the socioeconomic sphere are a sure recipe for Islamic radicalization.

nationhood where civic and territorial membership is opposed to an ethno-cultural one is the analytical basis for this comparative research (1992). KSGP, however, aim to elaborate a broader theoretical framework by including immigrants' claims. The main argument is that cross-national variations depend primarily on the different conceptions of national identity, in other words, the ways in which (nation) states and their understanding of membership play a role in the integration of immigrants and in the formulation of their claims. While Brubaker focused on individual access to citizenship, KSGP are equally interested in cultural group rights as the locus of debates on multiculturalism, so the combination leads to a new typology such as, for example, ethnic vs. civic distinction combined with multicultural vs. 'assimilationist'. KSGP propose a conception of citizenship as a 'conceptual and political space with different actors, which includes nation-states and sub-national actors'. This leads to three types of citizenship regimes: 'ethnic or exclusive', 'assimilationist and republican', and 'multiculturalist'.

The institutional and discursive opportunity structure as a framework of analysis allows KSGP to highlight the mobilization of collective actors and their influence on decision-making processes: institutional structures affect their claims for equal citizenship, for cultural rights, the fight against racism, and gives a legitimacy to their demands, while discursive opportunity structures (public speeches, events, publicity and media) facilitate the visibility of both actors and claims in the public arena, which in return affects political decisions. Contested Citizenship considers the interaction between these two structures, and shows how institutional and discursive structures shape political contention on integration and cultural diversity, and redefine citizenship. The objective is not necessarily to explain the evolution over time but to underline the dynamics that makes each case specific. Key theoretical positions such as multiculturalism, postnationalism and transnationalism are examined within this framework.

As a method, the authors have chosen a 'content analysis' of daily newspapers in five countries in order to explore the political claims made in the public sphere as well as protests and speeches. The political opportunity structure is combined with social movement and collective action analysis. While data on protest would allow the authors to measure a social movement from collective claims, political discourses reported in the newspapers are, according to the authors, a way of asserting the visibility of the claims and the 'challenges [to] the dominant cultural and political norms'. These sophisticated combinations of analytical frameworks and the collected data make Contested Citizenship a book rich in ideas, analysis and approaches, and also an important source for discussing methods and concepts.

I have, however, several methodological concerns. First, are newspaper reports enough for the analysis of such an important and sensitive topic?

Obviously newspapers report on the most visible events, on violence, on what is controversial in terms of the national ideology. For example, they highlight claims around religion in secular societies and focus on Islam perceived as a 'permanent difference'. The media have a selection bias, though, and the power to make their stories the dominant discourses. They create what we think we know, especially where we do not have direct experience, for example, our perceptions of migrants and Islam. The media reproduce the official rhetoric and report the facts that confirm its validity. Universalism, republicanism and egalitarianism are the common currency in the French media -as is confirmed in this book. Although in France and Germany there are many voluntary associations that are active on the local level and play an important role in the formulation of claims and the mobilization of immigrant populations, in negotiating their collective cultural needs (the opening of a mosque, for example) and/or social rights (education) with local authorities, they are rarely present in the media. These associations are active in civil society, have questioned the dominant ideology and have shaped society without being in the public sphere as captured by the media.

Thus 'the content analysis' of articles in the media necessarily limits the reality of collective action, the motivation of actors, their mobilizing force, their resources and also the response from the public -immigrant or nonimmigrant. Take, for example, the riots in the French suburbs that have shaken French society and beyond, alerting the international public to the problems that France is facing with regard to cultural diversity. In reality, the riots were not a new phenomena, it was just that those of autumn of 2005 lasted longer and were on the front page of the media. French public opinion was used to attributing such scenes to the black ghettoes of big American cities, because of the discriminatory and segregationist policies attributed to the 'American model'. According to the permanent official rhetoric of France as a universalistic, republican and egalitarian society, such a situation was inconceivable: at least, it would not be a structural characteristic of French society. This despite the fact that for more than 20 years, social questions raised by immigration, rather by the settlement of the immigrants of the 1960s, have been crystallized in the banlieues (suburbs), and have been backed up by research on cities, housing policy or by community studies since the 1980s. Yet the banlieues only attract the media's attention when the problems can be sensationalized, as in the successive headscarf affairs, which mainly concern schools in the banlieues. Then the role the media takes on is that of warning the political class and the public generally about Muslim communautarianism, to ring the alarm bells for the republican ideology and the principles of the laïcité (secularism). Paradoxically, in the riots of 2005, what was at stake was the social and cultural exclusion of the youth of the banlieues and their collective claim was to demand an alignment between the Republican rhetoric and the social reality. The young generation of Maghrebian and African origins brandished their French identity cards and claimed their Frenchness, by birth, by culture, by right, and rebuked France for failing to live up to its principles. While this was based on social reality, the France known to the newspapers was that of a society facing various Islamic challenges.

My methodological concerns are not confined to the reliance on the media but extend to concepts such as 'social movement'. The concept seems to lack a clear definition. Charles Tilly, for example, defines social movements 'as a series of contentious performances, displays and campaigns by which ordinary people made collective claims on others' (Tilly, 1993). For the French sociologist, Alain Touraine, a social movement is a movement of protest, contestation and a way of orienting society (Tilly 1993). These abstract visions raise the question of how to measure the outcomes of social movements: effect on social policy, incorporating a larger part of the population beyond the group itself, a collective benefit for the society? KSGP analyse the Extreme Right as a social movement, as a new national configuration in which ethno-national xenophobic claims are expressed and activists situated within certain institutional and discursive structures develop an action repertoire and a specific understanding of nationhood. Yet, in the case of the cultural claims of Muslim immigrants what is at stake is the conceptual change in liberal democracies that consider the recognition of cultural rights, with Islam -a religious collective identity -at the core and this does not arise out of a social movement or collective action, and the social force of the claims may be underestimated if all one relied on was newspapers.

The authors show that collective claims are now part of citizenship and complementary to individual rights. They develop a set of empirical indicators for the two dimensions of citizenship -individual equality and cultural rights -and show that all European countries, or rather all liberal democracies, are moving in the same direction, even though each national model is specific and distinctive. The convergence among countries that have a different understanding of individual and collective rights, in their tendency towards a distinctive national politics of recognition, has led the authors, like many other scholars to question the relevance of transnational and/or postnational membership. It has been argued that new political opportunity structures, like supranational institutions, have been offered to immigrants or to Europeans as a whole to make collective claims in the field of immigration politics, to fight against expulsion, and fight against racism [START_REF] Guiraudon | Mullticulturalism et Multiculturalisme et droit des étrangers au niveau Européen[END_REF]. These institutions are beyond national institutional structures and induce individuals to bypass national frameworks for their collective actions. Based on their comparative empirical research, KSGP conclude that postnational claims are marginal; in the majority of cases claim makers are firmly situated within the national context of the country of settlement. Moreover, they argue that 'such claims beyond the nation-state were found to be generally less supportive of immigration and migrant rights then national ones, which goes against the assumed benevolence of supra and transnational arenas relative to national ones' (p. 337). Supranationality is not replacing a national basis for claim making, but KSGP do not recognize that, as a matter of fact, supranational institutions are setting norms for states, norms that are also internalized by claim makers and used in the formulation of their claims against the state. The authors appreciate that transnational networks and ties with the homeland are part of immigrants' social organization, but show that citizenship regimes affect the degree to which certain group identities make homelandoriented politics possible and argue that an inclusive regime (France) limits, while colonial (Great Britain) and gastarbeiter (foreign worker) regimes (Germany and Switzerland) encourage homeland politics. Nevertheless, at the same time, their empirical study emphasizes that some groups are more oriented towards building transnational networks than others, such as the Kurds and Turks, and regardless of the country of settlement, even though it may be the case that transnational organizations, like supranational institutions, remain a reference-point in negotiating their claims and citizenship with the country of settlement.

So, rights are negotiated with national states but 'postnational' membership is a normative perspective for collective (as well as individual) rights. True, claims are formulated in relation to national policies, to national understanding of integration and in relation to national principles of statehood and nationhood, but they do not merely reproduce an existing national self-understanding and framework. In my book, Negotiating Identities: States and Immigrants in France and Germany (2002) -interestingly ignored in Contested Citizenship -I show precisely how states (institutional structures that have their own internal logic that influences actors) and national rhetoric affect identities around which communities are formed and become legitimate basis for claim and recognition. Yet migrants' claims change policies with regard to immigration, integration and citizenship, and lead the states to negotiate what will become, through these interactions, the core element of the national self. National models remain as rhetoric but, interactions between states and immigrants' claims formulated in relation to state's legitimacy bring a new dynamic to the understanding of citizenship and of nationhood. Claims in France, for example, contrary to the results in Contested Citizenship, which argues that they are made 'in terms of social equality regardless of origin', focus also on the collective recognition and representation of Islam in public institutions, which in return questions the definition and the limits of the laïcité and of citizenship.

In different ways, all European countries are facing the principle, the politics and/or the reality of multiculturalism -the second important issue addressed in this book. The authors use the term 'multiculturalism' to refer 'to immigrants' particularist group demands', in this way keeping themselves away from normative evaluations of this controversial concept. They affirm that in western European countries, the 'liberal dilemma' has been over 'multiculturalism and Islam'. To respond to this dilemma, KSGP propose an empirical investigation by taking into consideration group demands that go beyond rights of citizenship, on the one hand, and demands that require accommodation by the state on the other. Their research in three countries (Netherlands, Britain and France) shows that for 53 percent in France, 61 percent in Britain and 60 percent in the Netherlands, collective identities are expressed in religious terms and 'group demands are made through one religious self-identifications, i.e. Muslims' (p. 154). Comparative to other religions -Jews, Hindus -the authors highlight the 'Muslim exceptionalism' in group demands, which according to them is because of the nature of Islam and its understanding of private and public. Other studies too have put Islam at the core of the question of recognition [START_REF] Modood | Secularism and the Accommodation of Muslims in Europe[END_REF]Parekh, 2006). For them, the normative issue is the equal recognition of all religions within the existing institutional settings. These approaches put the onus on the secular and liberal state either to reshape its institutions in order to include Islam into the general framework of recognition. 'The "deficit" then does not lie in Islam, or solely in Islam, but in the British conception of race relations' [START_REF] Modood | Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain[END_REF], or in an inflexible ideology of laïcité as a reaction to collective claims around Islam [START_REF] Kastoryano | Negotiating Identities: States and Immigrants in France and Germany[END_REF].

The organization of Islam in France, for example, is a response to the 'institutional structure' that exists and would give to Islam -within the framework of CFCM -the French Council for Muslim Worship (not mentioned in the book) -the legitimacy of collective claims, a legitimacy rooted in the definition of laïcité itself. From a normative perspective, such an 'institutional assimilation' can lead to an identification with the state institutions and be considered as the post-multiculturalist approach where collective identities are part of a de facto religiously pluralist society.

Contested Citizenship: False Claims and 'Double Dutch'

A reply

PAUL STATHAM

University of Bristol, UK

Having been central to the research programme that culminated in this publication for more than a decade, I think I have pretty much heard every objection to approach and method that it's been possible to hear. Indeed, responding to criticisms contributed to refining and developing our perspective, which is how the academy ought to work. Other reviews for Contested Citizenship engage in a way that critically unpacks the book's contributions and arguments, and offer alternative viewpoints and critical commentary with regard to key issues. 1 By contrast, the reviews of Engelen and Kastoryano, are strewn with factual errors and misrepresentations. Disappointingly, our book simply serves as a vehicle for them to assert their own opinions on pet topics. It would be tiresome to go through systematically and correct the factual mistakes and misrepresentations of our study. An edited highlights includes: Engelen saying that we find more cultural group rights demands in the Netherlands and the UK than France, whereas the whole point of Chapter 4 is the reverse, that they are equally (and unexpectedly for institutional channelling approaches including our own past research) present also in France. Kastoryano fails to notice that our two-by-two diagram (p. 10) for


Andreas Wimmer
email: awimmer@soc.ucla.edu

RAINER BAUBÖCK is Professor of social and political theory at the European University Institute, Italy. Address: European University Institute,via dei Roccettini, 9, I-50014 San Domenico di Fiesole (FI), Italy. [email: rainer.baubock@eui.eu]

The left-Herderian ontology of multiculturalism ANDREAS WIMMER

The University of California, Los Angeles Will Kymlicka's new book moves away from the normative tradition of reasoning, to which his earlier work has made well known and widely respected contributions, towards a more empirically oriented perspective informed by political science and political sociology. The book describes the major historical events and organizational channels through which liberal multiculturalism has come to influence major international policymaking bodies, what the experiences with putting multiculturalism into practice have been in North American and Europe, and why the global spread of multiculturalism has come to a halt before having had any impact on the reality of ethnic exclusion in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Why has the multicultural revolution stalled? Kymlicka's answer is based on a thorough review of the empirical literature and stands out for its nuanced and balanced nature. But the author seems to shy away from drawing the full consequences of his own analysis as. The disjuncture between analysis and conclusion emerges, I will argue because the book has not managed to overcome the ontology of multicultural philosophy, and to adopt a more empirically and analytically oriented view on the relation between ethnicity and politics. It has, if you will, stopped halfway on the road from normative theory to political analysis.

DISJUNCTURE BET WEEN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS AND POLICY CONCLUSIONS

Will Kymlicka demonstrates that liberal multiculturalism has emerged under the following five conditions and argues that these also need to be fulfilled in order for other states and societies to adopt liberal multiculturalism in the future. First, only in established democracies will excluded minorities find the political space to articulate their demands and avoid being silenced and persecuted by hostile governments. Second, basic individual human rights need to be guaranteed and effectively enforced such that majorities can feel secure enough to grant collective rights to minorities without fearing that they will be oppressed in those regions and provinces where minorities will take over political power once granted territorial autonomy.

Third, liberal multiculturalism makes sense only where there is a clear opposition between a dominant ethnic group historically in control of the state and a minority that has been excluded from power. States controlled by minorities rather than majorities or governed by a multiplicity of smaller groups are less likely to develop and adopt liberal multiculturalism. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, only where states and dominant majorities do not have to fear that granting minority rights will empower irredentist minorities supported by a hostile neighboring state will they be prepared to grant minority rights and overcome their security fears. Finally, where the minority rights regime, as developed by international organizations as well as western policy circles and governments, is perceived as a neo-colonial imposition designed to weaken states that have shaken off the yoke of colonial domination only recently, minority rights are unlikely to be embraced voluntarily and effectively.

The policy recommendations that the author offers throughout his book, however, are strangely out of tune with this analysis. He argues not for less, but for more liberal multiculturalism, irrespective of whether or not the above conditions are met. He pleads for a more consistent approach that would implement the full array of liberal multiculturalist policies, thus overcoming what he describes as a piecemeal and contradictory policy adopted by the international community.

More specifically, he deplores that the European Union (EU) has given up on pushing for the territorial autonomy of Eastern European minorities in the face of stiff resistance from governments; he argues that instead of retreating to under-specified general rights for all types of ethnic minorities, Europe should develop specific rights for national minorities and immigrants; he criticizes the pragmatic conflict-prevention approach (e.g. of the OSCE) for the inconsistent, case-specific definition of what constitutes a satisfactory level of minority political participation and argues instead to force governments of conflict-torn societies to accept a full array of constitutionally enshrined minority rights; he takes the UN to task for not having developed a legal framework for national minorities and and for focusing exclusively on indigenous peoples.

The reader wonders: if liberal multiculturalism only makes sense in demographic and political constellations where a historically dominant majority has oppressed minorities, why recommend it to countries where minorities have oppressed majorities, as in Burundi or Syria, or where, as in Tanzania or Zaire, it does not make sense at all to talk of minorities and majorities? If a firm human rights regime is necessary to alleviate fears of illiberal minority rule, why demand minority rights for countries that are not able to guarantee even minimal habeas corpus rights? If secure state borders and friendly neighboring states are needed to avoid the very real possibility of irredentism and secessionism, why ask for multicultural rights for the Caucasus or the Balkans where borders are in flux and neighbors hostile to each other? Will Kymlicka does discuss, in the final pages of the book, a more realistic approach: that of sequencing the introduction of rights and demand minority rights only when human rights and democratic participation have been effectively institutionalized. This conclusion is fully compatible with his own analysis. But the idea of sequencing appears as an afterthought. In the main body of the book, Kymlicka asks for a deepening, broadening and worldwide generalization of minority rights now, irrespective of whether or not other rights are already guaranteed. And when sequencing is finally mentioned in the concluding chapter, he immediately tracks back, pointing out that solid knowledge about the proper sequence is lacking and hinting at cases such as post-Franco Spain where all rights were successfully introduced at the same time. Overall, then, the book reads like a defense of the initial argument, formulated some time ago, that spreading liberal multiculturalism across the globe and making it a principle of international law parallel to human rights is not only morally just, but also politically wise and feasible.

THE FALLACIES OF A LEFT-HERDERIAN ONTOLOGY

This inconsistency between analysis and conclusion derives, I believe, from the specific ontology that underlies the philosophy of multiculturalism developed by Will Kymlicka and others and that continues to provide the framework for this new book. What I mean by ontology are certain implicit assumptions about the basic building blocks and causal forces at work in society. Four such assumptions are crucial for what one could call the left-Herderian ontology of liberal multiculturalism.

First, the world is made up of states that guarantee or withhold rights to citizens and groups of citizens. Second, these state-bound societies are composed of ethnic groups.

Third, the majority group has dominated minorities and thus violated the basic cultural and political rights of the latter. Fourth, it is such violation of minority rights that produces conflict, while, conversely, the granting of such rights reduces conflicts.

Given these assumptions, globalizing multicultural policies is indeed the order of the day, despite all the difficulties that this project encounters. It is both morally preferable to continued ethnic exclusion and politically wise, because in the long run only multicultural rights can guarantee political peace. These conclusions are directly derived from the Herderian ontology and thus shielded from the insights of the author's own comparative political analysis.

Once we abandon this ontology and instead look at the real-world empirical constellations that we find across the globe, it becomes obvious how problematic these four assumptions are highly problematic. First, not all societies are governed by states that are capable of granting rights, as the recently burgeoning literature on 'failed states' shows. But even before such states became the concern of western governments fighting a 'global war on terror', there were large parts of the world that were not governed by strong centralized territorial states and where politics therefore was not about who gets which rights, but rather about who controls which parts of the territory and population.

The second assumption according to which societies are composed of ethnic groups is equally problematic, as [START_REF] Brubaker | Ethnicity without Groups[END_REF] and many others before him have shown. The left-Herderian ontology does not distinguish between what political leaders say about the relevance and pervasiveness of ethnicity on the one hand, and the everyday lived experience of members of an ethnic category on the other hand. In other words, there is no space for considering and understanding the politics of ethnic representation. Thus, situations where 'minority representatives' indeed represent the lived aspirations, cultural idioms and political projects of a large majority of that minority cannot be distinguished from a situation where such leaders stand for little other than their own political ambition, which might be openly rejected by, the very 'people' these leaders claim to represent.

Third, in many societies, the main lines of political exclusion and struggle follow the contours of class, region or clientelistic factions, all of which can cross-cut ethnic categories. Not all politics is necessarily and everywhere about ethnicity and not all ethnicity is politically relevant. I am involved in a new research effort to create a database on ethnic power relations in all countries of the world after 1945, in the hope of improving upon the widely used Minorities at Risk dataset produced by Ted Gurr (cf. [START_REF] Wimmer | Ethnic Politics and Violent Conflict, 1941-2005: A Configurational Approach[END_REF]. In 18 percent of country-years in this dataset, ethnicity is not politically relevant at all. For an additional 48 percent, ethnicity is politically relevant but the situation cannot be grasped by the majoritydominates-minority scheme either because the dominant group(s) form a demographic minority or because power is shared among more than one ethnically defined elite. Thus, the ontology of multiculturalism is at odds with approximately two thirds of the post-war world of independent states.

Fourth, the left-Herderian ontology also obscures rather than illuminates the processes that link ethnic politics to conflict. Ethnic conflicts often are not so much about rights that have been denied to ethnic minorities, but of making such types of demands and rights legitimate. More precisely, they are the consequence of tying rights to the ethnic or national background of individuals, a principle first introduced by the modern nation state. The diffusion of this institutional principle across the globe (e.g. into the realms of the former Soviet empire) opens up the question of who is member of a nation and therefore should be granted political participation, equality before the law etc. The answer is sought in a bloody history during which empires crumble, multiethnic states break apart and new nation states emerge, borders shift over people, and people are forced over borders. These conflicts and wars are the consequence of tying rights to ethnicity and nationhood where they were previously dissociated from each other (for empirical support of this hypothesis, see [START_REF] Wimmer | From Empire to Nation-state: Explaining Wars in the Modern World, 1816-2001[END_REF]. According to the left-Herderian ontology, however, rights are always and in principle a matter of ethnicity. The violent consequences of establishing this link in the first place therefore vanish from sight. This blind spot is illustrated in Kymlicka's analysis of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, which he attributes to a 'lack of minority rights'. Few regional experts would disagree, however, that the conflicts escalated when nationalist politicians started to advance competing and incompatible claims to rights and resources for their own ethnic constituencies.

How exactly linking rights to ethnicity and nationhood leads to conflict varies a great deal (cf. Wimmer, 2002: Ch. 4). More often than not, the political dynamic does not fit the 'lack of minority rights leads to conflict' scheme that the multicultural ontology implies. Sometimes it is long-oppressed majorities who mobilize against minorities on which colonial indirect rule relied, as Will Kymlicka himself notes; sometimes it is the elites of formerly independent states or regions (not long 'oppressed minorities') who fight against incorporation into a new state, as the Shan principalities of Burma; sometimes it is dominant, and not oppressed minorities who fight to secede from majorities rather than share resources with them and accept power sharing, as in Biafra; sometimes, various regional elites (none of them representing an 'oppressed minority') of a disintegrating empire pursue competing nationalist state-building projects, as in the former Soviet Union; sometimes the competition between clientelist power networks, organized along ethnic lines, escalates into violence (as between Inkatha and the African National Congress (ANC)); sometimes it is indeed, as the multiculturalist ontology foresees, minorities that fight for cultural and political rights long withheld from them by dominant majorities, as in Northern Ireland. Such is the case in roughly one fourth of all armed ethnic conflicts of the post-war world, according to our dataset, and in one seventh of all armed conflicts.

In summary, the left-Herderian ontology of multiculturalism corresponds to a rather specific, and empirically quite rare case of ethno-political constellations. Sometimes, there is no state to guarantee rights, neither multicultural nor others; in other cases, politics is not about ethnicity, but class, clientelistic competition, regional hegemony or political ideology; when, politics is primarily about ethnicity, it is not always the violation of the rights of minorities that leads to conflict, but elite competition for control of that state or the perpetuation of minority dominance through violence, and so forth.

Once the multiculturalist ontology is abandoned for a more realistic and differentiated view of how ethnicity relates to politics, we might want to rethink the policy conclusions that we should draw from past experience with the globalization of multiculturalism. If we want to achieve the goals of liberal multiculturalism, namely to reduce political domination, cultural oppression and economic discrimination along ethnic lines, we might have to abandon the idea of a global legal regime that fits all sizes, and instead proceed along a variety of different paths in different regions and countries. The toolbox, in other words, has to be opened and other ways to combat ethnic exclusion considered.

A non-ethnic, inclusive civil nationalism, perhaps of the rainbownationalism variant developed by some Carribean states [START_REF] Patterson | Context and Choice in Ethnic Allegiance: A Theoretical Framework and Caribbean Case Study[END_REF], might work very well for some countries in order to eliminate ethnic power hierarchies over time. A non-ethnic federal system without minority rights has helped Switzerland to avoid ethnocracy (Wimmer 2002: Ch. 8), but has not helped in overcoming ethnic discrimination when introduced in Bolivia. An ethnic federalism such as advocated by Will Kymlicka does not work in Nigeria and Ethiopia, but has produced benign results in India and Canada. A focus on anti-discrimination, including political discrimination, has helped to address ethnoracial inequalities in the USA, but it might produce perverse effects in Brazil (cf. the discussion in [START_REF] Telles | Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil[END_REF].

Ethnic group rights therefore should not be understood on the same level of universality as human rights. The conditions under which they work are much more specific, as Will Kymlicka himslef shows in this remarkable book. The conclusion therefore has to be that eliminating ethnic discrimination must proceed on a variety of different tracks, each adapted to the specific context (cf. also [START_REF] Wimmer | Toward a New Realism[END_REF]. This certainly produces inconsistencies across countries and groups that a systematically minded philosopher or a global law maker might deplore. But if abandoning the project of globalizing multiculturalism is the prize for a more realistic prospect of achieving its goals, who would not be willing to pay it?


The theory and practice of multicultural theorizing CHRISTINE CHWASZCZA

European University Institute, Italy

Multicultural Odysseys reports a success story -the successful promotion of the doctrine of liberal multiculturalism in the academic networks and legal-bureaucratic circles of international organizations (p. 247f.). As Will Kymlicka concedes with a degree of academic honesty often lacking today, in international practice the doctrine has been less successful, if not a failure (p. 248f.). The foreword promises to investigate the causes responsible for the gap between theory and practice. According to Kymlicka, those causes are to be found primarily in practice and on the level of implementation. I disagree.

Focusing on Chapter 7 -'The Global Challenge' -I would like to highlight two purely theoretical problems in the attempt to export the doctrine of liberal multiculturalism as a model of conflict resolution from Canada to 'postcolonial' states. Kymlicka's diagnosis, that the main obstacles to success have been political resistance to reform and inappropriate preconditions, sets up a scapegoat that distracts attention from theoretical and methodological limits of the doctrine itself that would have prohibited any attempt to export it to begin with. The first criticism concerns the theoretical structure behind the ideal of liberal multiculturalism, the second Kymlicka's image of the structure of international law and the problem that he calls 'sequencing' (p. 254), i.e. the relation between individual human rights and cultural group rights. On the basis of the two criticisms, my conclusion addresses Kymlicka's question as to whether normative approaches towards conflict resolution in international law and international politics should adopt the strategy of articulating 'general' or rather 'targeted' norms.

Like most liberal theories of justice -especially those inspired by Rawls's Theory of Justice (1971) -the doctrine of liberal multiculturalism is a theory of just institutions. Despite his disagreement concerning the normative significance of group-affiliations, Kymlicka endorses Rawls's general approach, which develops the ideal of a well-ordered institutional democracy. The complex social practices that constitute the institutional framework of the normative approach are an integral part of the concept of justice that it develops. It should be evident from the very beginning that normative requirements and ideals cannot be simply transferred to whatever conditions and conflicts prevail in practice, but must be adjusted to the empirical-practical conditions they are supposed to address.

Normative theorizing therefore can never be an exercise of pure normative arguments detached from the structure and conflicts that characterize empirical practice and the conditions of its normative reform or improvement. That makes normative theorizing inevitably 'contextual', at least if it is supposed to be of any practical relevance at all. As a consequence, one cannot simply 'apply' a normative theoretical idea to different empirical contexts, but has to develop different approaches in order to be able to address the specific practical conflicts and the particular sociopolitical environment that are one's concern.

Notwithstanding a common tendency to indulge in 'ideal' theory and to recast the analysis of sociopolitical practice exclusively as a task of 'justifying' normative goals and moral ideals, normative theorizing cannot avoid facing and analyzing the specific sociopolitical and institutional reality that is addressed. It therefore should not come as a surprise that normative theories can neither simply be applied to different sociopolitical realities nor exported from one problem area to another.

Since the structural differences between the type of conflict that Kymlicka hopes to address and the cultural conflicts in 'postcolonial' countries are partly acknowledged by Kymlicka, and elaborated by Andreas Wimmer, I will not repeat the need to recognize those differences. But I would like to stress that the failure to export liberal multiculturalism reflects not a problem of 'empirical preconditions,' but bad methodology and a mistaken image of the structure of normative theory.

The first criticism can be deepened. Personally, I have to confess that it has always escaped me why membership in a particular culture ought to be accepted as having the deep normative significance that Kymlicka and other multiculturalists assign to it. To be sure, it cannot be doubted that human beings cannot flourish outside some cultural environment. But the normative significance of being a member of a particular and specific culture or nation that is different from others (or more precisely different from the majority culture) is far from clear to me -especially if all cultures ought to be considered to be equally inherently valuable for their members.

My suspicion has always been that the driving force behind liberal multiculturalism is an egalitarian conception of (social) justice, and that multiculturalist politics are favored as a means -or path -to promote more social equality. The hidden rationale behind the enterprise obviously must be the conviction that social inequality runs parallel to group-membership and is caused by an unequal 'distribution of sociopolitical advantages' among groups. Multicultural Odysseys confirms that suspicion.

Regardless of the plausibility of the hidden rationale, the difficulties of identifying 'minority cultures' in conflicts that do not exhibit the 'majoritysuppresses-minority-pattern', and the problems that arise when the current cultural (national) minority has itself been suppressive or acted unjustly in the (postcolonial) past, illustrate not only conceptual difficulties, but a normative lacuna of liberal multiculturalism. Is it really justified or even obligatory to respect the normative significance of cultural affiliations if it nourishes conflict? Ought liberals to respect and protect 'minority cultures' if they are suppressive? And if the answer to the previous questions is 'no', that is to say, if the crucial concerns of justice are about peace, social justice and standards of egalitarian citizenship, what is then the normative significance of group affiliations and why should liberal multiculturalism be internationally promoted? Sadly, those questions remain unaddressed in Multicultural Odysseys.

The only place where Kymlicka comes close to addressing the limits of the doctrine of liberal multiculturalism occurs in his discussion of 'sequencing'. Here, Kymlicka considers the practical need to increase respect for individual human rights before implementing liberal multiculturalism in order to establish the sociopolitical preconditions that are necessary for multiculturalist politics to work. Where group-membership can become a matter 'of life and death', as Kymlicka observes, a step-by-step-approach starting from the protection of individual rights, moving towards differential treatment of cultural groups, might be advisable.

As a liberal, one might ask whether there really is a problem of sequencing. At least within the liberal paradigm it seems obvious that the protection of individual rights to life and subsistence ought to be given priority above differential treatment -not temporal, but normative priority -if the two conflict in such dramatic ways. The reason is not only that the protection of individual life and liberty weighs heavier than the value of cultural affiliations, but also that the protection of individuals' human rights overrides concerns of inter-group justice. Now, Kymlicka seems to think that the two kinds of normative concerns have an equal status, at least in the framework of contemporary international law. Such a view is suggested by his claim that the renaissance of the purpose of minority protection in the period after 1989 resembles or revives legal concerns of international law that predated the Second World War. That claim, I think, reflects a serious misunderstanding of the normative context that has been established by the development of humanitarian law and the international human rights regimes in the second half of the 20th century. It decontextualizes the minority-rights concern in international law and international relations. Even if contemporary documents use a similar terminology to earlier ones, the meaning and the intention behind those documents must be interpreted against the legal, normative and institutional context that has developed in the post-Second World War period.

To the extent that international law has come to be conceived of as a (modest) constraint for the legitimacy of domestic legal and political orders, this 'new' form of interventionism cannot be detached from the overall structure and purposes of post-war international law. Martha Finnemore (cf. [START_REF] Finnemore | The Purpose of Intervention[END_REF], among others, has highlighted the structural differences between pre-Second World War minority protection and interventionism on the one hand, and contemporary practice on the other. Whereas the former was to a significant extent Euro-chauvinistic, partisan Christian, and conducted for national interest, the 'new interventionism' is driven by human rights concerns about the victims and an ideal of collective security that opposes the promotion of 'national' interest -or other forms of group interests -but receives its normative justification from the legal (and moral) principles of international human rights law.

Historically and systematically, the recent initiatives for minority rights in international law are better understood as a development of human rights concerns, whereby the focus on group rights expresses not so much a commitment to normative support of cultural groups per se, but a response to the particular structure of the kinds of conflicts that are addressed. In other words, it more likely reflects a pragmatic rather than a normative attitude.

That leaves us with the question of how to proceed, be it within or beyond liberal multiculturalism. Kymlicka's question of whether international norms in support of domestic justice should be general or targeted remains untouched.

Although I have myself argued for 'new interventionism' (cf. [START_REF] Chwaszcza | Moral Responsibility and Global Justice: A Human Rights Approach[END_REF], I share a general skepticism towards attempts to develop general normative solutions for cultural and sociopolitical conflicts in postcolonial states. The empirical evidence we have from peace-keeping, peaceenforcement, post-conflict reconstruction and humanitarian intervention so far do not support the search for general theories and grand design. Even worse, recent studies by Roland Paris or Michael Ignatieff, and others, indicate that liberal ideals of justice have proven unapt as a method for conflict resolution in divided societies (cf. [START_REF] Paris | At War's End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict[END_REF][START_REF] Ignatieff | State Failure and Nation-building[END_REF].

Given the fact that internal (violent or pre-violent) conflicts almost always result from a syndrome of causes and are maintained for a multiplicity of reasons, a theoretically modest case-oriented approach seems more reasonable. It therefore seems advisable to postpone the search for 'norms' -be they general or targeted -and to rely instead on normatively informed judgments for case to case. Our normative ideals provide no practically informative guidance, as long as we do not understand the empiricalpractical sides of particular cultural and sociopolitical conflicts.

The problem is far from new or unique. Those, for example, who still believe that there exists such a thing as 'development economics' and not just neo-classical economics, have basically given up the idea of developing a general theory, because the causes and situational factors that hinder development are so heterogeneous that it does not make sense to look for a general theory or for general recipes.

The practical failure of the doctrine of liberal multiculturalism in this sense is not exceptional. But given the rise of intra-state cases of violent conflicts in recent decades, now is neither the time for academic networking, nor for the application of ideal theory, but for interdisciplinary cooperation and the courage to reassess traditional premises of political liberalism. By trying to reassess the practical success of liberal multiculturalism, Multicultural Odysseys is making a step in such a direction.

Kymlicka's odyssey -lured by norms into the rocks of politics GWENDOLYN SASSE

University of Oxford, UK

Will Kymlicka has written another major study of multiculturalism that will keep the academic community occupied for years to come and attract the attention of policy makers. The title of his new book -Multicultural Odysseys -evokes the image of long and nightmarish journeys, though there is no apparent Odysseus-type protagonist in the story he tells. The book is written in the style of an extended essay and places Kymlicka's


Christine Chwaszcza
email: christine.chwaszcza@eui.eu

Gwendolyn Sasse
email: gwendolyn.sasse@nuffield.ox.ac.uk

Will Kymlicka

Kymlicka's odyssey -lured by norms into the rocks of politics

sense is not exceptional. But given the rise of intra-state cases of violent conflicts in recent decades, now is neither the time for academic networking, nor for the application of ideal theory, but for interdisciplinary cooperation and the courage to reassess traditional premises of political liberalism. By trying to reassess the practical success of liberal multiculturalism, Multicultural Odysseys is making a step in such a direction. normative view of minority rights in the context of European and, to some extent, global politics. While Kymlicka has long moved beyond 'pure' political philosophy, compared to previous publications he now incorporates a much larger slice of the 'real' world of human and minority rights. As the balance of his analysis now tilts towards the latter, the conceptual and empirical problems inherent in this endeavour have become more obvious. Normative theory and empirical research are always difficult to marry. While not rooted in original empirical research as such, this book is clearly driven by an empirical concern that the author addresses with a sense of urgency. For Kymlicka believes that the window of opportunity for establishing an international environment favourable to the promotion of 'liberal multiculturalism', which opened up in the last decade of the 20th century, appears to be closing. The globalization of multiculturalism has become unstuck before it could really take off. In the introduction, Kymlicka refers to the 'increasing internationalisation of state-minority relations and the global diffusion of multiculturalism as a new framework for reforming those relations' (p. 3). By the time he reaches the conclusion, pessimism prevails: 'the time for a real push on minority rights may have passed' (p. 315). Can we be so categorical about the developments in the international system? In fact, Kymlicka, it seems to me, overstates the 'dramatic shift' towards a European or international consensus on national minority rights, including territorial autonomy as a best practice, in the early 1990s. Equally, he overestimates the international shift against such minority rights by the turn of the century.

The book makes for a powerful read precisely because the combination of a normative starting point, and an empirical driving force reveals the author's activist stance. The promotion of any political agenda, however, necessarily involves a selective reading of the world around you. Kymlicka's selectivity, which must be deliberate rather than accidental, manifests itself in two ways in this book: in a selective description of European or international declarations, recommendations and examples of 'hard' and 'soft' law, and in a selective engagement both with the empirical research on his cases (groups, countries, regions, international institutions) and, more importantly, with conceptual and empirical challenges to his arguments. What does not fit the 'norm' or argument is left out altogether, or at best marginalized. For example, he emphasizes the importance of the 1990 OSCE Copenhagen Declaration and resolutions of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which mention territorial autonomy for national minorities, but he glosses over the disputes accompanying these documents and modifications. Kymlicka's previous work on minorities has been a foundation for the development of new debates on the issue, but his claim to start a long overdue debate with this book, where there isn't one at the moment, is a misrepresentation of the current state of affairs in the study and policy making on national minorities and, in particular, immigrants. The problem is that the newer strands of this debate are pointing in a direction that goes against the gist of some of Kymlicka's arguments.

In Multicultural Odysseys, Kymlicka repeats a distinction he has made before: he differentiates between the needs and rights of indigenous peoples, national minorities and immigrants. Though convincingly pointing to the need to reconsider the categories we use to label and define groups or group rights and the assumptions they are built upon, he does not engage critically with his own previously established categories [START_REF] Kymlicka | Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights[END_REF]. That not all national minorities demand self-government, let alone territorial autonomy, is a criticism Kymlicka has heard many times. However, he once again only addresses this in passing and, for the most part, focuses on familiar cases that involve a claim to autonomy. In fact, the demands of national minorities and immigrants and the actual policy responses to these demands are not always as different as Kymlicka implies, as his own examples of immigrants' 'polyethnic rights' (e.g. language, religion) demonstrate. Similarly, the implied distinction between 'old' and 'new' minorities is flawed. It creates the impression of clear-cut and static temporal categories where, in fact, the boundaries are much fuzzier [START_REF] Boswell | European Migration Policies in Flux: Changing Patterns of Inclusion and Exclusion[END_REF][START_REF] Sasse | A Research Agenda for the Study of Migrants and Minoritiess in Europe[END_REF]. The questioning of the logic underpinning these distinctions is not only a conceptual issue, as the increasing overlap of 'old' and 'new' minority issues in the discourse of international institutions, such as the OSCE or the Council of Europe, demonstrates. The Advisory Council in charge of the monitoring process that goes with the Council of Europe's Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (FCNM) has a record of questioning the definitions or lists of 'national minorities' given by the signatories. Kymlicka fears that any widening of the definitions and exclusive lists of named groups in the operation of the FCNM will gradually undermine the principle of national minority rights. A closer look at the comments of the Advisory Committee, however, reveals that its main function has been as a check on politically motivated omissions and narrow definitions. These conceptual and empirical challenges are suspect to Kymlicka who fears that the essence of specifically targeted national minority rights is being watered down as a result of the widening of group definitions. Here the normative drive reveals its essentialist core. It would have been more rewarding if Kymlicka had revisited his own arguments more critically and tackled criticism or alternative interpretations head-on.

Kymlicka rightly identifies a mixture of European security concerns in the context of post-communist wars and conflict potential as the starting point of the normative shift towards the international promotion of multiculturalism in the early 1990s. Thus, he acknowledges that a set of 'real' policy issues tied to security concerns brought minority rights on to the international political agenda. He simultaneously presents the 'securitisation' of minority rights as a problem undermining norms rooted in the principles of justice. Thus, we are left with a conundrum: security concerns made international and, in particular, European institutions single out minority protection as a means of conflict prevention and conflict management in the 1990s, but in Kymlicka's view these concerns also contain the seeds of the demise of a meaningful norm of minority rights. The empirical reality of politics spells out both the norm's relevance and its potentially fickle resonance. The assumption that 'security trumps justice' (p. 191) is too simplistic. For, as I have argued elsewhere, the recognition of an intricate 'security-rights-nexus' might be a more fruitful conceptualization than an 'either-or' choice between security and justice (Sasse, 2005a).

A point that Kymlicka made so well in previous writings is at the heart of his definition of 'liberal multiculturalism': minority rights can be reconciled with the fundamentals of liberalism, as a member of a minority group has to make a choice as an individual whether or not to be associated with this group and claim rights by reference to this group. This logic nicely cuts through the endless debates about individual vs. group rights. In his new book, Kymlicka builds on this earlier argument by pointing to the need to distinguish further between 'generic' minority rights and 'specifically targeted' minority rights. This is both a useful conceptual clarification and policy recommendation, but it does not per se amount to a new framework of analysis. Kymlicka knows that the codification of targeted minority rights is politically unrealistic and says as much in the conclusion.

To me, the limitations of Kymlicka's arguments become most obvious in his long chapter on 'the European experiment', the main testing ground because of the intensity of multilayered international institutions with a remit touching on minority issues. It is easy to find factual inaccuracies in a study of this scope. However, some of these are more critical than others. Referring to the 'ethnic Russian minority' in Estonia and Latvia misses the point that the minority at stake is, in fact, a loose linguistic one (Russophones) rather than a clearly defined national minority, and at least partly explains its lack of political mobilization. Calling the EU an 'international organization' and treating it as such has implications for the argument presented. Given that the EU has become a more supranational than an international organization, EU law has a much more direct and comprehensive effect on the member states. Therefore, the EU's quite elaborate antidiscrimination acquis should have been included in Kymlicka's discussion. Though not specifically targeting minority rights, many of the nondiscrimination provisions touch on minority-related issues, and these recent developments in EU law qualify Kymlicka's statement about a shift away from the principle of minority protection. Moreover, the EU's eastward enlargement and the EU's increasing involvement in conflict management provide a rich empirical setting to analyse the scope and limitations of international involvement. With regard to the former, Kymlicka refers to the inclusion of 'minority rights ' (p. 4, n. 26) in the EU's Copenhagen criterion, though the actual wording of the condition is more cautious, asking potential member states to safeguard the 'respect for and the protection of minorities', while deliberately avoiding a reference to 'rights' or 'national minorities'. In a footnote, Kymlicka refers to the late addition of a weak reference to minorities in the draft EU Constitution (p. 235,n. 73). This reference brought EU law in line with the organized formulation of the first Copenhagen criterion. Kymlicka detects a change for the worse where, in fact, little has changed in rhetoric or practice. Although Kymlicka refers to the inconsistencies involved in the enforcement of the EU's minority condition, the evidence and ongoing debates about the effectiveness of the EU's conditionality are only alluded to, despite their significance for his overall argument [START_REF] Kelley | Ethnic Policies in Europe: The Power of Norms and Incentives[END_REF]Sasse, 2005b;[START_REF] Hughes | Exit" in Deeply Divided Societies: Regimes of Discrimination in Estonia and Latvia and the Potential for Russophone Migration[END_REF].

With regard to the conflicts in former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union, Kymlicka's category of 'homeland minorities' wanting to re-establish self-government does not accurately capture the nature of these conflicts. He does not discuss the role of institutional legacies that shaped the outbreak and dynamics of conflict. Many of the regions he refers to, such as Abkhazia, South Ossetia or Kosovo, enjoyed a degree of autonomy before the collapse of communism and were reacting to the threat of changes to their constitutional status that came from hegemonic nationalisms during the transition. When de facto and de jure autonomy re-emerge amidst attempts to resolve conflicts, this principle is not new, and it fits within a socialist tradition of managing nationalism rather than being a normative principle as such. Similarly, the institutional legacy and the experience of state disintegration in the former Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union have shaped the reluctance towards autonomy across Eastern Europe rather than the 'fear' that national minorities 'will collaborate with enemies of the state', i.e. with kin-states (p. 183). Kymlicka posits that two preconditions make the accommodation of minority demands, especially the claim to autonomy, more unlikely in transition states: the absence of reliable human rights protection and the ongoing securitization of ethnic relations (p. 182). A closer look at the empirical evidence from Central and Eastern Europe, however, calls this conclusion into question: precisely at the time when transition states with sizeable national minorities -for example Slovakia, Romania or Bulgaria -were consolidating their democracies, the respective ethno-political parties dropped or moderated their claims to territorial autonomy. The sustained significance of ethnic parties in several Central and Eastern European countries points to an alternative channel for minority demands and puts Kymlicka's statement in perspective that, for example, the Hungarian minority in Slovakia is 'relatively powerless in relation to the overwhelming ethnic Slovak majority in the country' (p. 185).

Kymlicka's first-hand experience with the many groups and countries around the world has been, as he says in the introduction, through workshops and advisory groups on the accommodation of diversity, multiculturalism and minority rights. Extrapolating the global circulation of these ideas from selected groups of like-minded academics or policy makers runs the risk of overestimating the normative shift in the first place. Similarly, the increasing marginalization of national minority rights also appears exaggerated. The normative approach breeds high expectations and great disappointments. Kymlicka's biggest contribution is to forcefully point to the 'minefield of conceptual confusions, moral dilemmas, unintended consequences, legal inconsistencies and political manipulation' (p. 8) tied to the rights of minorities.


What went wrong with liberal multiculturalism? RAINER BAUBÖCK

European University Institute, Italy

In contrast with other contributions to this review symposium, I share Will Kymlicka's assessment of the virtues of liberal multiculturalism and his desire to further elaborate its repertoire so that it may become acceptable and applicable under conditions that are radically different from, and much less favourable than, those prevailing in western democracies.

In his new book, Kymlicka suggests that, after strongly promoting liberal multiculturalism in the 1990s, international law and international organizations are now caught in an impasse and likely to retreat. I am not sure that this diagnosis is correct. Multiculturalism is certainly under attack in Europe, but may still be alive and kicking under different names in other parts of the world. The adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples shortly after publication of Kymlicka's book -albeit in a watered-down version -suggests at least that progress on some fronts is still possible. However, there is certainly a strong sense of doubt about the task description, and chances of success for international efforts to promote liberal solutions to multicultural conflicts seem to have become dimmer.

I see three possible diagnoses for the current malaise. The first one is that this is as good as it gets. The international communities' commitment to multiculturalism may have been genuine, insofar as it has been perceived as a natural extension of the human rights agenda and as a means to defuse dangerous ethno-national conflicts, but it has now reached its limits. After all, international organizations operate within the normative framework of the Westphalian state system and are committed to maintaining this framework. Where liberal multiculturalism is seen to conflict with its normative foundations, it has to give way.

The second diagnosis is that we are witnessing a real backlash. Maybe the international community's commitment was not genuine but merely conditional. Multiculturalism was supported insofar as it was seen to contribute to the more fundamental goals of peace, democracy and development. Now there are doubts, nourished by an increasing number of public intellectuals, not only about exporting multicultural solutions to post-communist and developing countries, but also about their effects on social solidarity, gender equality and overall societal cohesion in western democracies.

A third diagnosis focuses instead on the justification of liberal multiculturalism. It responds to the second one that there may be less wrong with the actual policies of multiculturalism than with some of their ideological underpinnings. It would certainly be naive to suggest that the lack of good theories is a major cause of political retreat. Real-world obstacles are well identified in Kymlicka's book, and my first and second diagnoses are probably both part of a fuller explanation. But in order to build a case against retreat, it may not be enough to take into account non-western contexts, to add more specific instruments that target different types of claims, and to adopt a strategy of sequencing cultural rights, as Kymlicka suggests in the concluding chapter of his book. We also need a more coherent defence of multiculturalism that resonates with the most progressive aspects of international law. This is anyway all that academics committed to liberal multiculturalism can do.

The problem I see with Kymlicka's defence of liberal multiculturalism is that it remains too strongly rooted in a culturalist version of liberal nationalism. Liberal nationalism shares with all other kinds of nationalism the view that, ideally, political and cultural boundaries should coincide. What makes liberal nationalism liberal are two further ideas. First, belonging to a national community is not an intrinsic value, but an instrumental one. 1 It is important for individual autonomy and well-being [START_REF] Tamir | Liberal Nationalism[END_REF][START_REF] Kymlicka | Multicultural Citizenship[END_REF] or for social justice and solidarity among citizens [START_REF] Miller | On Nationality[END_REF]. Second, since all individuals have equal rights to autonomy and well-being or to citizenship in a democratic state, the communities to which they are affiliated must also be treated equally. It follows that every nation has the same claim to self-determination and that minorities have rights to protect their culture against dominant majorities through pursuing their own projects of nation building.

This theoretical framework cannot be fully shared by international organizations and lawyers. An equal right to self-determination for all nations would immediately conflict with the basic Westphalian norm of territorial integrity of states. International law does, however, support a principle of 'self-determination of peoples'. In order to reconcile this with the territorial integrity of states, 'peoples' have been defined more narrowly than 'nations' [START_REF] Cassese | Self-Determination of Peoples. A Legal Reappraisal[END_REF].

Unlike normative theorists, international lawyers do not have to build coherent theories, but interpret norms they find in treaties and evolving state practices. The break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia has led to new interpretations of self-determination, but there is still wide agreement that it does not entail a right of stateless nations to secession and independence. Theories of multiculturalism that appear to endorse such rights will be looked at suspiciously by most international organizations and lawyers. This may explain their reluctance to go any further that I associate with the first diagnosis above.

Kymlicka is not very explicit on this point. He is aware that international organizations have strong security concerns about threats to territorial integrity, but it is less clear whether he thinks that liberal justice requires a right of nations to self-determination. In his view, national majorities have to grant demands for minority self-government as a matter of justice, but he does not seem to support analogous obligations of minorities who have been granted strong autonomy to respect the territorial integrity of multinational democracies (see Kymlicka, 2001: Ch. 5). Ambiguity on this point may, however, be fatal for a theory that aims to inform a morally coherent and politically sustainable approach to minority rights in international law.

Kymlicka is right that there is a huge gap in the current 'generic rights' stream of international law between, on the one hand, the universal cultural rights of Art. 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and, on the other hand, the right of self-determination of peoples proclaimed by the UN Charter and both UN human rights conventions. Yet adding targeted self-government rights for specific kinds of minorities would not address the deeper cause of the problem, which is the irreconcilable tension between self-determination and territorial integrity. As long as self-determination remains there as the ultimate prize, many minority nationalists will regard rights to territorial autonomy as only a first step, while most governments will see them as one step too far. What we need instead are normative principles for accommodating rival claims that support equilibrium solutions [START_REF] Laitin | Nations, State, and Violence[END_REF].

As I have suggested elsewhere, this would require abandoning selfdetermination as a general principle and promoting instead a general right to self-government that applies to existing states as well as to historic substate political communities, and even to transnational modes of citizenship that link migrants and diaspora communities with an external 'homeland' [START_REF] Bauböck | Paradoxes of Self-determination and the Right to Selfgovernment[END_REF]. A principle of unilateral self-determination is not universalizable, whereas a principle of self-government can be applied universally as long as all rights-holders are required to accommodate rival claims by accepting nested and overlapping political jurisdictions. I am perfectly aware that this proposal entails a quite radical departure from current international law since it challenges the current equation between sovereign states and self-governing political communities. But it seems to me a more coherent answer than liberal nationalism can provide to the question of how tensions between security and justice can be reduced through strengthening progressive principles in international law (see also [START_REF] Buchanan | Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination. Moral Foundations for International Law[END_REF].

My second critique concerns the culturalist foundations of Kymlicka's approach. As he has explained in his earlier work, Kymlicka thinks that liberals ought to value membership in a cultural community not as an object of individual choice, but as a background that makes other choices in one's life meaningful. A background culture that enables individuals to be autonomous must generally be 'an intergenerational community, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language and history (Kymlicka, 1995: 14), in other words, a nation. This core element of Kymlicka's theory has been criticized both from sociological and normative perspectives. The latter critique points out that opportunities for individual autonomy may be greater where the background culture is itself multicultural and where individuals are seen to belong to several cultures simultaneously [START_REF] Waldron | Multiculturalism and Melange[END_REF]. The former critics have accused Kymlicka of reifying national cultures that are themselves constantly in flux and constructed by government institutions and ethnic entrepreneurs in order to gain popular support for their claims [START_REF] Brubaker | Ethnicity Without Groups[END_REF].

I cannot engage here with the substance of these charges, but I think they do touch a weak spot when it comes to promoting liberal multiculturalism in the international arena and to defending it against critics in domestic ones. Kymlicka's culturalist justification for minority rights is at odds with the normative foundations of modern human rights law and raises therefore suspicions among progressive international lawyers. The hard core of minority rights in international law is not grounded in values of either cultural diversity or cultural belonging, but in individual liberty and equality and assumptions about 'standard threats' to these values in modern states and societies. One good reason why international law does not, and should not, refer more explicitly to the value of cultural membership is that there is little hope to find consensus on what this value might be and what it entails for state duties of cultural protection.

Instead of taking the detour via the value of cultural membership, it seems to me much more promising to refer directly to three basic values of international human rights law. These are: liberty, equality and self-government. Article 27 ICCPR (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) rights of minorities 'to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practise their own religion, or to use their own language' can be easily defended on grounds of liberty of thought, speech and association. The core principle of non-discrimination in human rights law can support more farreaching duties of governments to provide protection to individuals and to ensure that cultural membership does not become a disadvantage in access to other basic public goods and resources. A more comprehensive notion of equality can also support exemptions from certain public laws for religious minorities or claims to symbolic recognition and material support for minorities, but these kinds of cultural rights are difficult to generalize across contexts and need to be negotiated in democratic settings.

For the rights that I have listed so far, invoking a cultural justification may not be the best strategy to defend them, but it makes little difference with regard to the outcome. The question becomes really important only in specifying the third value of self-government. If international law attributed a right to self-government to specific groups on the basis of their cultural characteristics then it would directly contribute to the reification of group identities and would provide incentives for nationalist entrepreneurs as well as for national governments to prove their claims through strategies of cultural homogenization.

The main deficit in the current normative framework of international law is that there is no coherent answer to the question of how to resolve conflicts over which territory belongs to which jurisdiction and which political community individuals ought to be citizens of. These boundary issues would become even more difficult to address once we mix them with claims to cultural protection, cultural homelands and cultural membership. The alternative answer of sticking simply to the value of equality is not helpful either, since it presupposes an answer to the question: equality among whom? The boundaries of political communities must be settled first before we can develop a full account of equality among those who are rightfully subjected to a particular jurisdiction.

What can be done by international law and international organizations in answering these boundary questions? My hunch is that we do need general principles for the settlement of territorial conflict and for allocating citizens to specific political communities at sub-state, state, and suprastate levels. However, in order to be sufficiently universal, these principles must remain fairly general. One cannot and should not specify in advance the cultural characteristics of groups that can claim self-government rights. Ultimately, devolving self-government powers to territorial sub-units is a matter of constitutional settlements within particular polities. Negotiating these rights in democratic deliberations is the only way for how they can be specified. In such negotiations, each side has to show that it has a democratic mandate for its claims. And working out arrangements of nested selfgovernment in such a setting will in turn strengthen commitment to democracy among all parties involved (Laitin, 2007: Ch. 5).

Where the preconditions for such negotiated settlements are absent or where negotiations fail and break down into violent conflict, the international community may have to mediate or intervene. But the modes of self-government that can keep together deeply diverse polities must ultimately be worked out by these societies themselves. Social scientists can compare solutions that have worked and specify the conditions under which they have worked and political theorists can elaborate the normative principles that ought to be accepted by all involved in such conflicts. But ultimately, it is for citizens and their representatives to work out how to distribute self-government power across political communities whose territories and membership overlap with each other.

Kymlicka's account of liberal multiculturalism in the international arena remains torn between the foundations of his normative theory and realistic insights into the limitations of international law. This tension cannot be fully resolved, but it could be alleviated by shedding some of the culturalist and nationalist baggage of the theory.

Notes

1 Jonathan Glover has stated this nicely as a variation on Kant's categorical imperative: 'Always treat nations merely as means and never as ends in themselves' (Glover, 1997: 29).