Nationalism and Pluralism

Once the idea of "one culture, one state" is abandoned, a different and more constructive question follows: how can different cultures and communities survive and flourish together within a single country? It is in pursuit of exactly this goal that many democratic societies today have introduced measures that recognise and protect the identity of cultural minority communities living within their territory. The Indian Constitution, for instance, has an elaborate set of provisions for the protection of religious, linguistic and cultural minorities.

Across different countries, the kinds of group rights that have been granted include: constitutional protection for the language, culture and religion of minority groups and their members; and, in some cases, an explicit right to representation for identified communities as a group in legislative bodies and other state institutions. Such rights can be justified on the grounds that they provide equal treatment and protection of the law for members of these groups, while also protecting the group's cultural identity as such. Different groups need to be given this kind of recognition as part of the wider national community — which means that national identity itself has to be defined inclusively, in a way that can recognise the importance and the unique contribution of every cultural community within the state.

Even where such recognition and protection is granted, however, some groups may continue to demand separate statehood. This can look paradoxical at a moment when globalisation is also spreading across the world, yet nationalist aspirations continue to motivate many groups and communities even so. Dealing with such demands in a fair, democratic manner requires considerable generosity and skill on the part of a country's institutions and leaders.

To sum up the discussion of self-determination and pluralism together: the right to national self-determination was historically often understood to include a right to independent statehood for every nationality. But granting independent statehood to every group that sees itself as a distinct cultural group, or nation, would not only be practically impossible — it would probably also be undesirable, since it could lead to the formation of a large number of states too small to be economically and politically viable, multiplying rather than solving the problem of minorities. The right has therefore been reinterpreted, in most cases, to mean granting certain democratic rights to a nationality within an existing state.

We live in a world that is deeply conscious of the importance of giving recognition to identities. Today we see many struggles for the recognition of group identities, and a great many of them use the language of nationalism to make their case. While it is important to acknowledge legitimate claims to identity, we also need to be careful not to let identity claims lead to division and violence within society. It helps to remember that every person carries many identities at once — based on gender, caste, religion, language or region — and may take pride in more than one of them together. So long as each person feels genuinely free to express these different dimensions of their own personality, they are less likely to feel a need to press the state for political recognition of any single one of those identities alone. In a democracy, the political identity of a citizen should be broad enough to encompass all of the different identities that a person may actually hold. Intolerant and homogenising forms of identity and nationalism — forms that insist on only one identity and try to erase the rest — would be genuinely dangerous if they were allowed to take root. …