Diversity

The United States is of course not the only diverse society. Other immigrant and liberal democratic societies—such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—have been as active or more active in the recognition of diversity. The liberal democracies of western Europe have become more diverse under the impact of immigration, first fostered because of labor shortages, then continuing because their liberal traditions accept such reasons for immigration as the unification of families and the seeking of refuge from persecution. In this way, the ideology of diversity has spread throughout the liberal democratic world.

In each country one may see variations in the response to diversity. Thus, Canada became a leader in promoting multiculturalism in its efforts to accommodate the demands and interests of francophone Quebec. This has made it particularly sensitive to claims of other groups, and it offered opportunities to maintain cultural distinctiveness to immigrant groups that cannot lay claim to a specific territory. It would go too far afield to describe all the various responses to diversity, but in general the kind of forceful assimilation that was common in the past—as in the case of "Russification" in the Russian empire—is everywhere in the liberal democratic world in retreat. Turkey, for example, which had long suppressed the language and autonomy claims of its large Kurdish minority, has had to acknowledge these claims as it aims to enter the European Union.

But liberal democratic political theory, which is oriented to the individual and the individual's rights, does not sit easily with the range of issues raised by diversity. What are the rights of the group, or the rights of an individual as part of a group? The classic work of twentieth-century liberalism, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), takes no account of this issue—the individual confronts the state or society with no intermediate formation, and this is true of classic liberal political theory generally. If a group is concentrated in a territory, one can accommodate its interests through some degree of autonomy, but when, as in the United States and in other immigrant societies, a group is spread through the population, the recognition of diversity raises difficult questions, as was particularly evident in the battles over multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States. Similar conflicts are ever more evident in western Europe. What becomes of the historic national identity when a range of diverse groups is given recognition, appreciation, and places at the tables of education, culture, and government? These issues will be part of the agenda of the liberal democratic world for many years to come.