Neutrality of what?

In what sense should a liberal state be neutral between the conceptions of the good held by its citizens? Traditionally, liberals have provided two different answers to this question. Some have adopted a conception of neutrality of justification, while others a conception of neutrality of effects. Recently, Alan Patten has defended an alternative, novel and sophisticated, conception of neutrality – neutrality of treatment. In this article I assess whether neutrality of treatment is, in fact, a superior conception of neutrality. I try to show that neutrality of treatment suffers from the very same weaknesses that Patten attributes to its alternatives and that, overall, neutrality of justification, properly construed, provides a more promising account of both the sense in which a state ought to be neutral and of the object of neutrality. Finally, I argue for a broader account of the normative bases of liberal neutrality than the one proposed by Patten. This account includes, beyond considerations of fairness, a relational principle of equal standing.     

Normative political theory,democratic politics and minority rights

In Equal Recognition, Alan Patten argues that in a proper relationship between normative political theory and democratic politics, we must make a clear distinction between two questions related to cultural rights: (a) authority (who should decide?) and (b) the substance of deliberation. The question he wants to explore, however, is not the authority question but the substantive question. The aim of this article is to show that an account of equal recognition cannot bracket out the democratic element. It argues, first, that Equal Recognition does not live up to its initial promise, as it contains a number of reflections and recommendations (on language rights, on secession, on the rights of migrants’ cultures) that either explicitly or implicitly include the democratic element. Second, it points at other important areas of political decision-making – such as electoral system design, districting, referendums, quotas – in which it is quite clear that in order to extend equal recognition to minority cultures, we are obliged to take decisions related to the design of democratic institutions.     

Alan Patten’s theory of equal recognition and its contribution to the debate over multiculturalism

In this introduction, we first give a brief overview of the debate over multiculturalism in political theory. We then situate Alan Patten’s Equal Recognition in that context by highlighting his major normative thesis, according to which there are reasons of principle, in a liberal democracy, to grant special forms of public recognition and accommodation to cultural minorities. Finally, we present a succinct summary of the nine articles that follow this introduction and that critically engage with Patten’s arguments.     

Islam,immigration and group recognition 1

Islam generally, and Muslim immigrant communities in particular, have recently been targeted for criticism by Western academics and in popular Western media. This article explores the substance of these criticisms and weighs them against the beliefs and practices of Muslim immigrants in Western liberal democracies. The article addresses three distinct questions. First, what sorts of cultural adaptations is it reasonable for liberal democratic states and societies to expect immigrants to make, and what kinds of adaptation is it unreasonable to demand? Second, how vulnerable are Islamic beliefs and practices to the criticisms commonly leveled against them in the name of liberal democracy and gender equality? Finally, how strong are the parallels between the claims for political recognition and accommodation that issue from immigrant cultural communities and the claims for recognition and inclusion that issue from groups that have historically been marginalized within liberal democratic societies? Although the authors do not dismiss the notion that there may be tensions between the core commitments of liberal democratic societies and some Islamic practices, they conclude that these tensions are exaggerated by Western writers. Muslim communities generally pose no greater challenge to liberal societies than do other religious and immigrant communities. Western writers should be chary of rejecting their claims to toleration and accommodation too swiftly.     

Missing the overlap between theory and practice: Patten’s ‘equal recognition’ in the face of the Catalan case

Drawing on the particularities of Catalonia (and related cases), the general point of this contribution is to argue that Patten’s equal recognition theory is modeled upon a too-restricted set of empirical assumptions, a circumstance that might harm its value as a tool for the orientation, evaluation, and reform of public policy. What is absent in Patten’s account – or at least not properly inserted into it – are four built-in modules that we have named ‘history’, ‘democracy’, ‘international relations’, and ‘migration’. When it comes to recognition of minorities, the past matters more often than Patten is willing to accept; democracy can lead to permanent departures from equal recognition on the part of self-governing national minorities; in the recognition game, there are other relevant players than simply states and their minorities; and one of these players, namely immigrant groups, can (albeit involuntarily) distort equal recognition schemes.     

Fairness and equal recognition

An important contribution of Alan Patten’s Equal Recognition is the conception of neutrality that grounds his defence of minority cultural rights. Built in to his conception of neutrality of treatment is a notion of ‘fairness’ whose effect is to provide an upfront, across the board limitation on the demands cultural minorities may legitimately make on the rest of society. There must be limits on the duty to accommodate, but it obscures more than it illuminates to build this into the content of the right to equal recognition itself. We see more clearly what is at stake in these conflicts by articulating the value of self-determination independently and taking account of necessary limits to its satisfaction as part of a second-stage analysis of what duties may be claimed and against whom. Familiar principles of discrimination law exemplify this alternative model. This presents the interest in self-determination more robustly, while acknowledging that the claims of duty arising out of it are defeasible. The result is a more flexible and nuanced exploration of the complex moral issues involved when fundamental interests clash.     

William Talbott’s Which Rights Should be Universal?

In this review essay, I first set out and then subject to criticism the main claims advanced by William Talbott in his excellent recent book, “Which Rights Should be Universal?”. Talbott offers a conception of basic universal human rights as the minimally necessary and sufficient conditions to political legitimacy. I argue that his conception is at once too robustly liberal and democratic and too inattentive to key features of the rule of law to play this role. I suggest that John Rawls’s conception of human rights comes closer to hitting the mark Talbott sets for himself and that Talbott incorrectly rejects Rawls’s view. I conclude that what likely divides Talbott and Rawls is that Rawls, but not Talbott, explicitly frames the inquiry into the minimally necessary and sufficient conditions to political legitimacy in terms of a liberal democratic people attempting to determine, as a matter of its just foreign policy, whether or not to recognize other organized polities as independent and self-determining within the international order.     

Deliberative Democracy and Social Choice

The paper contrasts the liberal conception of democracy as the aggregation of individual preferences with the deliberative conception of democracy as a process of open discussion leading to an agreed judgement on policy. Social choice theory has identified problems - the arbitrariness of decision rules, vulnerability to strategic voting - which are often held to undermine democratic ideals. Contrary to common opinion, I argue that deliberative democracy is less vulnerable to these difficulties than liberal democracy. The process of discussion tends to produce sets of policy preferences that are 'single peaked'; and within a deliberative setting it may be possible to vary the decision rule according to the nature of the issue to be decided.     

Measuring Liberal Democratic Performance: an Empirical and Conceptual Critique

Liberal democratic performance is understood as the delivery of liberal democratic values, and not as regime longevity or government efficacy. Measuring it is a matter of how far liberal democratic governments achieve in practice the values they endorse in principle.
It is recognized that the performance of liberal democratic governments varies widely. But extant attempts to measure this variation suffer problems of reliability and validity, and the object of measurement is often unclear.
By defining the range of liberal democratic values we demonstrate that performance is multidimensional and that trade-offs across different values can create distinct performance profiles. The narrow gauge of the extant meaures – usually of just one or two values – is often disguised by single scales that masquerade as summary performance indicators.     

Representing the People: Laclau as a Theorist of Representation

Going beyond conventional conceptions of political representation, Ernesto Laclau takes representation to be a general category and not just limited to formal political institutions, and he takes representation to be performative in that it also brings about what is represented. This article examines the implications of this conceptualization of representation for Laclau’s theory of populism. Laclau takes populism to be exemplary of his conception of representation because populism is a discourse that brings into being what it claims to represent: the people. This is important for current debates about populism and the crisis of democratic institutions, whether domestic or international. I show how our conceptions of representation inform how we think about populism and liberal democracy, and specifically about populism as a threat to liberal democracy at the domestic or global level. I show this in the context of a reading of Jan-Werner Müller’s influential critique of populism.     

Review Article: Modus vivendi versus public reason and liberal equality: three approaches to liberal democracy

Liberal democracy constitutes a particularly attractive political model with its emphasis on both popular sovereignty and individual liberty. Recently several new and innovative articulations of the liberal democratic ideal have been presented. This article reviews three of these recent theories and particularly their democratic credentials. The selection includes theories emphasizing modus vivendi, Rawlsian political liberalism and liberal equality. Taken together these theories show different ways to conceptualize democracy within liberal thought. I argue that ultimately all three approaches struggle with articulating a persuasive conception of democracy, but nevertheless these theories show that liberals do think seriously about the role of democracy in their theories.     

Signs of change in North Korea

The spread of liberal democracy around the world has raised the risk of wishful thinking by students of democratization who hope that what they study will happen. One way of reducing this risk is to focus on regions that challenge the expectations and explanations of democratization. Four criteria can roughly measure a region's ‘recalcitrance’ in this regard: the extent to which it: (1) lacks liberal democracy, thus disappointing democ‐ratizers; (2) is diverse, thus making it hard to explain the lack of liberal democracy with across‐the‐board generalizations; (3) seems not to fit a particularly common expectation, e.g., that more well‐to‐do countries should be more liberal‐democratic; and (4) has leaders who have articulated a serious critique of liberal democracy. By meeting all of these criteria more fully than other parts of the world, Southeast Asia qualifies as the most recalcitrant region. The anomalousness of Southeast Asia is no reason for pessimism. But it does suggest that observers would do well to diversify what they mean by democracy beyond its conventionally liberal form.     

Defending broad neutrality

ABSTRACT

This paper interrogates Cécile Laborde’s account of the proper role of religion in the liberal state. It begins by examining Laborde’s claims that prevailing liberals are not committed to broad neutrality about the good, but rather only restricted neutrality about the good—and that they are right to do so. It argues against Laborde on both exegetical and substantive grounds. It then turns to Laborde’s minimalist conception of secularism, according to which the state must be justifiable, inclusive, and limited, and it argues that it is not sufficiently demanding. Finally, it argues that the classical liberal presumption of skepticism toward religious establishment is warranted.     

Liberal Citizenship: Medieval Cities as Model and Metaphor

In a recent article in Space & Polity, Nezar AlSayyad and Ananya Roy draw suggestive analogies between medieval urban forms and troubling contemporary realities, such as gated urban enclaves and impoverished squatter settlements. Invoking the medieval city as an analytical device, they show how several prevalent urban practices of citizenship are in tension with, and sometimes flatly contradict, liberal complacencies and democratic hopes. However, this article suggests that there is another story to be told, using some of the medieval cities they invoke to critical ends. The narrative highlights the ways in which certain medieval spatial and civic forms might enrich liberal and democratic aspirations, helping us to re-imagine at least two core values of liberal democratic citizenship.     

Conceptions of the good,rivalry, and liberal neutrality

Liberal neutrality is assumed to pertain to rival conceptions of the good. The nature of the rivalry between conceptions of the good is pivotal to the coherence, scope and realisation of liberal neutrality. Yet, liberal theorists have said very little about rivalry. This paper attempts to fill this gap by reviewing three conceptions of rivalry: incompatibility rivalry, intra-domain rivalry and state power rivalry. I argue that state power rivalry is the morally relevant conception of rivalry, and that it has significant implications for the scope and realisation of liberal neutrality. I conclude that in the light of state power rivalry, the only feasible liberal neutral state is a very minimal one.     

Unequal but fair? Cultural recognition and self-government rights

This review of Patten’s Equal Recognition suggests that minority rights can be grounded either in cultural accommodation rights or collective self-government rights. I defend four propositions: (1) individuals’ interests in membership in political communities cannot be reduced to their interests in being able to pursue their own conceptions of the good; (2) liberal states do not have to extend neutrality as equal treatment to self-government claims that intersect with their own jurisdiction; (3) claims for the establishment of public languages and territorial autonomy need to be justified on the basis of self-government rights rather than on grounds of equal treatment of cultural identities; (4) as a condition for their admission, immigrants can be expected to waive collective self-government rights rather than cultural protection rights.     

Constitutionalism and experimentalist governance

This comment explores how experimentalist governance is connected to wider constitutional questions and makes two claims. First, there are good reasons to believe that experimentalist governance can only flourish in a world where the precepts of liberal democratic constitutionalism have been widely accepted and institutionalized. Experimentalist governance is part and parcel of the world of liberal democratic constitutionalism. Second, it is not only governance in Europe that can be described in experimentalist terms. The concept is also useful to describe the dynamics of European constitutionalism.     

Accommodating toleration: on Balint’s classical liberal response to the multiculturalism challenge

ABSTRACT

Peter Balint identifies three challenges to toleration, one of which is the multiculturalism challenge. This is the charge that liberal toleration fails to accommodate minorities adequately, which requires positive recognition rather than negative toleration. I discuss his response to the multiculturalism challenge and its connection to a classical liberal view of toleration. This involves Balint’s claim that liberal neutrality should be understood as reflective and ‘difference-sensitive’, which should be realised by the state being ‘hands-off’ in the sense of withdrawing support for privileged ways of life. I argue that Balint’s classical liberal view that the state needs to be ‘hands-off’ is in need of specification and that it does not fit well with his claim that neutrality needs to be reflective and difference-sensitive.     

Is Liberal Democracy Sliding into ‘Democratic Despotism’?

Post‐democracy and cognate concepts suggest that the postwar period of democratisation has given way to a concentration of power in the hands of small groups that are unrepresentative and unaccountable, as exemplified by the rise of multinational corporations and their influence on democratic politics. This article goes further to argue that this does not fully capture the triple threat facing liberal democracy: first, the rise of a new oligarchy that strengthens executive power at the expense of parliament and people; second, the resurgence of populism and demagogy linked to a backlash against technocratic rule and procedural politics; third, the emergence of anarchy associated with the atomisation of society and a weakening of social ties and civic bonds. In consequence, liberal democracy risks sliding into a form of ‘democratic despotism’ that maintains the illusion of free choice while instilling a sense of ‘voluntary servitude’ as conceptualised by Tocqueville.     

Should We Support Illiberal Religious Democracies?

The terms on which the US will agree to settle the conflict in Afghanistan reflect a much greater issue that the US faces in the Middle East: will it support only those who seek to establish democratic regimes that also respect individual, or ally itself with the often much more powerful groups that may be democratic, but are likely to foster regimes based on Shari'a law? At the very least, the West should urge all to respect the right to life, call on regimes to negotiate with protesters rather than machine‐gunning them, and insist that protesters follow the Egyptian and Tunisian model of peaceful uprising. Beyond such liberal basics, it is best to let each nation work out its own regime. As a matter of policy, in order to support democratic groups and evolving democratic regimes in the Middle East, western governments had best be prepared to ally themselves with political forces whose liberal credentials, one must recognise, are evolving but not yet particularly high.